“Let me put it in this way,” he began, knitting his brows, and marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy. “This is the question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board. You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden, and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke—but it had its meaning—at least to me. Now I want to ask you—if I decide to form another Company, a very small and particular Company—if I should decide to form it, I say—could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board? Of course I could ask—but what I mean is—well, I guess you know what I mean.”
The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of physical ascendancy had melted away—disappeared. He looked at Lady Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the silence which ensued.
“Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say,” she observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his self-command. “Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you,” she went on. “We—we have been lagging behind unconscionably. If you wish to please me, let us hurry forward now. And please!—no more talk at all!”
“But just a word—you're not angry?”
She shook her head very slightly.
“And you do know that I'm your friend—your solid, twenty-four-carat friend?”
After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper—“Yes—be my friend—if it amuses you,”—and led the way with precipitate steps down the winding road.
CHAPTER XIII
TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train for Geneva—homeward bound.