And oddly enough, it was Colville who preached patience to his companions in suspense.
“Give him time,” he said. “There can only be one answer to such a proposal. But he is young. It is not when we are young that we see the world as it really is, but live in a land of dreams. Give him time.”
The Marquis de Gemosac was impatient, however, and was for telling Barebone more than had been disclosed to him.
“There is no knowing,” he cried, “what that canaille is doing in France.”
“There is no knowing,” admitted Colville, with his air of suppressing a half-developed yawn, “but I think we know, all the same—you and I, Marquis. And there is no hurry.”
After three days Loo Barebone had still given no answer. As he hoisted the sail and felt for the tiller in the dark, he was, perhaps, meditating on this momentous reply, or perhaps he had made up his mind long before, and would hold to the decision even to his own undoing, as men do who are impulsive and not strong. The water lapped and gurgled round the bows, for the wind was almost ahead, and it was only by nursing the heavy boat that he saved the necessity of making a tack across the narrow creek. In the morning he had, as usual, run down into the river and to the slip-way, little suspecting that Miriam and Sep were just above him behind the dyke, where they had sat three days before listening to Dormer Colville’s story of the little boy who was a King. To-night he ran the boat into the coarse and wiry grass where Septimus Marvin’s own dinghy lay, half hidden by the reeds, and he stumbled ashore clutching at the dewy grass as he climbed the side of the dyke.
He went toward the turf-shelter half despondently, and then stopped short a few yards away from it. For Miriam was there. He thought she was alone, and paused to make sure before he spoke. She was sitting at the far corner, sheltered from the north wind. For Farlingford is like a ship—always conscious of the lee- and the weather-side, and all who live there are half sailors in their habits—subservient to the wind.
“At last,” said Loo, with a little vexed laugh. He could see her face turned toward him, but her eyes were only dark shadows beneath her hair. Her face looked white in the darkness. Her answering laugh had a soothing note in it.
“Why—at last?” she asked. Her voice was frank and quietly assured in its friendliness. They were old comrades, it seemed, and had never been anything else. The best friendship is that which has never known a quarrel, although poets and others may sing the tenderness of a reconciliation. The friendship that has a quarrel and a reconciliation in it is like a man with a weak place left in his constitution by a past sickness. He may die of something else in the end, but the probability is that he must reckon at last with that healed sore. The friendship may perish from some other cause—a marriage, or success in life, one of the two great severers—but that salved quarrel is more than likely to recur and kill at last.
These two had never fallen out. And it was the woman who, contrary to custom, fended the quarrel now.