At this Mrs. Pallant got up; she stood there looking down at me. "You make my reparation—my expiation—difficult!" And leaving me still more astonished she moved along the terrace.
I overtook her presently and repeated her words. "Your reparation—your expiation? What on earth are you talking about?"
"You know perfectly what I mean—it's too magnanimous of you to pretend you don't."
"Well, at any rate," I said, "I don't see what good it does me, or what it makes up to me for, that you should abuse your daughter."
"Oh I don't care; I shall save him!" she cried as we went, and with an extravagance, as I felt, of sincerity. At the same moment two ladies, apparently English, came toward us—scattered groups had been sitting there and the inmates of the hotel were moving to and fro—and I observed the immediate charming transition, the fruit of such years of social practice, by which, as they greeted us, her tension and her impatience dropped to recognition and pleasure. They stopped to speak to her and she enquired with sweet propriety as to the "continued improvement" of their sister. I strolled on and she presently rejoined me; after which she had a peremptory note. "Come away from this—come down into the garden." We descended to that blander scene, strolled through it and paused on the border of the lake.
V
The charm of the evening had deepened, the stillness was like a solemn expression on a beautiful face and the whole air of the place divine. In the fading light my nephew's boat was too far out to be perceived. I looked for it a little and then, as I gave it up, remarked that from such an excursion as that, on such a lake and at such an hour, a young man and a young woman of common sensibility could only come back doubly pledged to each other.
To this observation Mrs. Pallant's answer was, superficially at least, irrelevant; she said after a pause: "With you, my dear man, one has certainly to dot one's 'i's.' Haven't you discovered, and didn't I tell you at Homburg, that we're miserably poor?"
"Isn't 'miserably' rather too much—living as you are at an expensive hotel?"