And so it was to be the same thing again—the same monotonous round that it had been before. He had liked Treliss at first. It had been quaint, romantic, interesting, and he had loved the sea. And then the hotel with its quaint name, “The Man at Arms,” and its picturesque Elizabethan architecture. If he could be there alone, just for a day!
They went back to their carriage, and found that the two extra seats, tenanted hitherto by a man and his wife who were negligible from every point of view, were now occupied by two very young people. A further glance classified them as “honeymooners,” and Mrs. Maradick found them no longer interesting. She sank into her novel, and there was absolute stillness save for the soft whirr of the wheels beneath them and the rush of the air outside the windows.
The couple opposite him were very quiet—sometimes there was a whisper or a laugh as their eyes met. He knew that look in the eyes and that clasp of the hand. He knew that they were, both of them, outside the train, flying through space, without thought of time or any confining boundaries. What fools they were; he would like to tell them so. He would like to show them that he had been like that once, fifteen years before. He had thought that there would never be an end to it, and it had lasted barely a year.
And so they passed into Cornwall. Every year at that moment there came the same strange thrill, the same emotion as of something ancient and immutable crossing the very modern and changing texture of his own life.
Mrs. Maradick put down her novel and looked about her.
“It will soon be Truro,” she said; “and then there’ll be all that troublesome changing at Trewth. It’s really too absurd that one should have that all the time. Dear Louie! I wonder what she’s doing now—gone to look at the garden, I expect, like the dear girl she is. I hope they will give us the same rooms again this year. You wrote for them, didn’t you?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Because you know last year they tried to put those stupid Jones’s in, and if I hadn’t made quite a row about it they’d have turned us into the east wing with that great dreary sweep of sea and not a glimpse of the town in front.”
He remembered that he had rather envied those rooms in front; there had been a magnificent view of the sea, and a little corner with an old greystone pier and red fishing-boats.
Mrs. Maradick turned her attention to the girls.