We had come to a pause. His confidences were exhausted for the present. He had told me all that it was necessary for me to know before I met Brenda and his sister; and I waited for him, now, to renew his invitation. I preferred that he should re-open that subject; but he came to it rather obliquely.
“Well!” he remarked. “Might as well be getting on, I suppose?”
I nodded and got out of the car.
“Can you find your way up?” he proceeded.
“Alone?” I asked.
“It’s only about half a mile,” he explained, “You can’t miss it. You see, I want to get the car back to the house. Don’t do it any good standing about here. Besides, it wouldn’t do for them to think as I was holding it over them.”
Even the picture of a herculean Banks holding that car over the Jervaises failed to divert me, just then. I was too much occupied with my new friend’s simple absence of tact. I would sooner have faced a return to the Hall than an unsupported appearance at the Farm.
“Oh! I’m not going up there alone,” I said.
Banks was honestly surprised. “Why not?” he asked. “You met Anne last night, didn’t you? That’ll be all right. You tell her I told you to come up. She’ll understand.”
I shook my head. “It won’t take you long to run up to the Hall and put the car in,” I said. “I’ll cut across the Park and meet you in that wood just below your house—the way that Jervaise and I went last night.”