It all but amused the Doctor. "You inspire remarkable efforts."
"Well, I'm incapable of making them." It seemed now queer enough. "I can't stay to dinner."
"Then we'll go." With which however. Doctor Hatch was not too preoccupied to have had his attention, within the minute, otherwise taken. "What a splendid piece!" he exclaimed in presence of the ivory tower.
"It is splendid," said Gray, feeling its beauty again the brightest note in the strangeness; but with a pang of responsibility to it taking him too. "Miss Gaw has made me a present of it."
"Already? You do work them!"—and the good physician fairly grazed again the act of mirth. "So you'll take it away?"
Gray paused a moment before his acquisition, which seemed to have begun to guard, within the very minute, a secret of greater weight. Then "No, I'll come back to it," he said as they departed by the long window that opened to the grounds and through which Miss Mumby had brought him in.
BOOK THIRD
I
"Why I haven't so much as seen him yet," Cissy perforce confessed to her friend, Mrs. Bradham's friend, everybody's friend, even, already and so coincidentally, Graham Fielder's; this recipient of her avowal having motored that day from Boston, after detention there under a necessity of business and the stress of intolerable heat, but having reached Newport in time for tea, a bath, a quick "change" and a still quicker impression of blest refreshment from the fine air and from various other matters. He had come forth again, during the time left him between these performed rites and the more formal dressing-hour, in undisguised quest of our young lady, who had so disposed certain signs of her whereabouts that he was to waste but few steps in selection of a short path over the longest stretch of lawn and the mass of seaward rocks forming its limit. Arriving to spend with the Bradhams as many or as few days as the conditions to be recognised on the spot might enjoin, this hero, Horton Vint, had alighted at one of those hours of brilliant bustle which could show him as all in his element if he chose to appear so, or could otherwise appeal at once to his perfect aptitude for the artful escape and the undetected counterplot. But the pitch had by that moment dropped and the company dispersed, so far as the quarter before him was concerned: the tennis-ground was a velvet void, the afternoon breeze conveyed soft nothings—all of which made his occasion more spacious for Horton. Cissy, from below, her charmingly cool cove, had watchfully signalled up, and they met afresh, on the firm clear sand where the drowsy waves scarce even lapsed, with forms of intimacy that the sequestered spot happily favoured. The sense of waiting understood and crowned gave grace to her opened arms when the young man, as he was still called, erect, slim, active, brightly refreshed and, like herself, given the temperature, inconsiderably attired, first showed himself against the sky; it had cost him but a few more strides and steps, an easy descent, to spring to her welcome with the strongest answering emphasis. They met as on ground already so prepared that not an uncertainty, on either side, could make reunion less brave or confidence less fine; they had to effect no clearance, to stand off from no risk; and, observing them thus in their freedom, you might well have asked yourself by what infallible tact they had mastered for intercourse such perfect reciprocities of address. You would certainly have concluded to their entire confidence in these. "With a dozen people in the house it is luck," Horton had at once appreciatively said; but when their fellow-visitors had been handled between them for a minute or so only to collapse again like aproned puppets on removal of pressure from the squeak, he had jumped to the question of Gray Fielder and to frank interest in Cissy's news of him. This news, the death of Mr. Betterman that morning, quite sufficiently explained her inability to produce the more direct impression; that worthy's nephew and heir, in close and more and more quickened attendance on him during the previous days, had been seen as yet, to the best of her belief, by no one at all but dear Davey—not counting of course Rosanna Gaw, of the fact of whose own bereavement as well Horton was naturally in possession, and who had made it possible, she understood, for their friend to call on Graham.