The procession of clouds suffered a brief interlude at that moment in their steady transit and the sinking sun shone out warm and mellow, full of odours of peat and moss and reedy mud. Swarms of tiny midges danced in the long level light and several drowsy butterflies rose out of nowhere and fluttered over the mounds.
“Oh, there’s Brand coming!” cried Mrs. Renshaw, suddenly, with a queer contraction of her pale forehead, “and the bell has stopped. How strange we none of us noticed that! Listen! Yes—he’s begun the service. Can’t you hear? Oh, what a pity! I can’t bear going in after he’s begun.”
Brand Renshaw, striding unceremoniously over the graves, approached the group. They rose to greet him. Nance felt herself surveyed from head to foot, weighed in the balances and found wanting. Linda hung back a little, shamefaced and blushing deeply. It was upon her that Brand kept his eyes fixed all the while he was being introduced. She—as Nance recognized in a flash—was not found wanting.
They stood talking together, easily and freely enough, for several minutes, but nothing that Nance heard or said prevented her mind from envisaging the fact that there had leapt into being, magnetically, mysteriously, irresistibly, one of those sudden attractions between a man and a girl that so often imply—as the world is now arranged—the emergence of tragedy upon the horizon.
“I think—if you don’t mind, Brand,” said Mrs. Renshaw when a pause arrived in their conversation, “we’ll slip into the church now for a minute or two. He’s got to the Psalms. I can hear. And it hurts me, somehow, for the poor man to have to go through them alone.”
Nance moved at once, but Linda pouted and looked shyly at Brand. “I’m tired of the church,” she murmured. “I’ll wait for you out here. Are you going in with them, Mr. Renshaw?”
Brand made no reply to this, but walked gravely with the two others as far as the porch.
“Don’t be surprised if your sister’s spirited away when you come out, Miss Herrick,” he said smilingly as he left them at the door.
Returning with a quick step to where Linda stood gazing across the marshes, he made some casual remark about the quietness of the evening and led her forth from the churchyard. Neither of them uttered any definite reference to what they were doing. Indeed, a queer sort of nervous dumbness seemed to have seized them both, but there was a suppressed surge of excitement in the man’s resolute movements and under the navy blue coat and skirt which hung so delicately and closely round her slender figure. The girl’s pulses beat a wild excited tune.
He led her straight along the narrow, reed-bordered path, with a ditch on either side of it which ended in the bridge across the Loon. Before they reached the bridge, however, he swerved to the left and helped her over a low wooden railing. From this point, by following a rough track along the edge of one of the water meadows it was possible to reach the sand-dunes without entering the village.