"I was only going for a walk to nowhere in particular." She looked at him with an irresistible mixture of coyness and frankness and suggested, "Would you care to come for a little walk too? It's far too early for tea."
What could the poor gentleman do? He gushed over the suggestion of course, and accepted it.
"I was going to walk down to the shore," she said. "Will that suit you?"
Mr. Hobhouse assured her that anywhere would suit him; he had no choice at all: anywhere, everywhere, nowhere would be all the same to him.
As they walked side by side down towards the sea, he was suddenly struck with the sense of being in a familiar situation, of a repetition of something that had happened before. And then he realised that this was actually the walk that the same girl and a young man Merton had taken on a memorable August night. He noted through his glasses the very wall behind which he had lit his pipe when the flare of his match revealed the butt end of a pistol, and presently they were following the same winding way above the beach.
This did not serve to make the playing of his part any the easier. It filled him in fact with a continual fear of giving himself away by doing something he had done before. It was really a most irrational fear; but there it was. Under the circumstances his sustained babble and blink were distinctly creditable.
But what gave him a more excusable cause for apprehension was Miss Rendall's own attitude. That there was something on her mind, something behind her words, he felt morally certain. She spoke in the most natural way and on the most commonplace topics, but there were frequent silences and it was during those he felt that without looking directly at him, she was watching him. And once or twice he got it into his head that she was a little puzzled and uncertain, though whether it was about what to think or what to do, he had no conception. He told himself that all this was only his own morbid imagination. Still, it made that walk an uncomfortable ordeal and seldom did actor have to work harder to keep his end up.
Luckily however the man had the virtue of impudence and not only did he manage to entertain the lady with a garrulous account of his antiquarian researches (reasoning acutely that women are seldom experts in such matters), but he even ventured to broach a delicate subject for his own ends.
"The gentleman who—er—resided with Dr. Rendall last summer was not, I believe, very interested in antiquities," he observed. "Did you know him, Miss Rendall? Mr. O'Brien was his name, I believe."
"Yes," she said, "I knew Mr. O'Brien."