“What a man!” he cried. “Who gave him leave to talk like that of Mr. Doorm? How did he know you weren’t related to him? And what surpassing coolness to call you by your Christian name! Confound him—he’s gone the way we wanted to go. I believe he knew that. Look! He’s fooling about in the ditch, waiting for us to overtake him!”
Nance could not help laughing a little at this. “Not at all, my dear. He’s looking for shrew-mice.”
“What?” rejoined the other crossly. “On the public road? He’s mad. Come, we must get round him somehow. Let’s go through here and hit the tow path.”
They had no more interruptions as they strolled slowly back along the river’s bank. Nance was perplexed, however, by Adrian’s temper. He seemed irritable and brusque. She had never known him in such a mood, and a dim, obscure apprehension to which she could assign no adequate cause, began to invade her heart.
They had both become so silent, and the girl’s nerves had been so set on edge by his unusual attitude towards her, that she gave a quite perceptible start when he suddenly pointed across the stream to a clump of oak trees, the only ones, he told her, to be found in the neighbourhood.
“There’s something behind them,” she remarked, “a house of some kind. I shouldn’t like to live out in that place. How they must hear the wind! It must howl and moan sometimes—mustn’t it?” She smiled at him and shivered.
“I think I miss London Bridge Road a little, and—Kensington Park. Don’t you, too, Adrian?”
“Yes, there’s a house behind them,” Sorio repeated, disregarding her last words and staring fixedly at the oak trees. “There’s a house behind them.”
His manner was so queer that the girl looked at him with serious alarm.
“What’s the matter with you, Adrian?” she said. “I’ve never known you like this—”