“I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. I know it’s awfully ungrateful of me to complain when Lady Gale has given me such a good time. . . . I’ve no explanation at all. . . . It's silly of me."
She stared out to sea, and she knew quite well that the explanation was of the simplest, she was in love with Tony.
When it had come upon her she did not know. She had certainly not been in love with him when she had first come down to Treliss. The idea of marrying him had been entertained agreeably, and had seemed as pleasant a way of settling as any other. One had to be fixed and placed some time, and Tony was a very safe and honourable person to be placed with. There were things that she would have altered, of course; his very vitality led him into a kind of indiscriminate appreciation of men and things that meant change and an inability to stick to things, but she had faced the whole prospect quite readily and with a good deal of tolerance.
Then, within the week, everything had changed. She wondered, hating herself for the thought, whether it had been because he had shown himself less keen; he hadn’t sought her out in quite the way that he had once done, he had left her alone for days together. But that could not have been all; there was something else responsible. There was some further change in him, something quite apart from his relation to her, that she had been among the first to recognise. He had always had a delightful youth and vitality that people had been charmed by, but now, during the last week, there had been something more. It was as though he had at last found the thing for which he had so long been looking. There had been something or some one outside all of them, their set, that he had been seeing and watching all the time; she had seen his eyes sparkle and his mouth smile at some thought or vision that they most certainly had not given him. And this new discovery gave him a strength that he had lacked before; he seemed to have in her eyes a new grandeur, and perhaps it was this that made her love him. But no, it was something more, something that she could only very vaguely and mistily put down to the place. It was in the air, and she felt that if she could only get away from Treliss, with its sea and its view and its crooked town, she would get straight again and be rid of all this contemptible emotion.
She had always prided herself on her reserve, on the control of her emotions, on her contempt for animal passion, and now she could have flung her arms round Tony’s neck and kissed his eyes, his hair, his mouth. She watched him, his round curly head, his brown neck, the swing of his shoulders, his splendid stride.
“Let’s sit down here,” he said; “they can’t see us now. I’m not going to help ’em any more. They’ll call us when they’re ready.”
She sat down on a rock and faced the sweep of the sea, curved like a purple bow in the hands of some mighty archer. He flung himself down on to his chest and looked up at her, his face propped on his hands.
“I say, Alice, old girl,” he said, “this is the first decent talk we’ve had for days. I suppose it’s been my fault. I’m awfully sorry, and I really don’t know how the time’s gone; there’s been a lot to do, somehow, and yet it’s hard to say exactly what one’s done.”
“You’ve been with Mr. Maradick,” she said almost fiercely.
He looked up at her, surprised at her tone. “Why, yes, I suppose I have. He’s a good chap, Maradick. I have been about with him a good bit.”