He swung round in astonishment at hearing his name. For the first moment he did not recognize Vennie. Her newly purchased attire,—not to speak of her unnaturally flushed cheeks,—had materially altered her appearance. When she held out her hand, however, and stopped to take breath, he realized who she was.
“Oh Mr. Dangelis,” she gasped, “I’ve been following you all the way from the Hotel. I so want to talk to you. You must listen to me. It’s very, very important!”
He held his hat in his hand, and regarded her with smiling amazement.
“Well, Miss Seldom, you are an astonishing person. Is your mother here? Are you staying at Weymouth? How did you catch sight of me? Certainly—by all means—tell me your news! I long to hear this thing that’s so important.”
He made as if he would return with her to the town, but she laid her hand on his arm.
“No—no! let’s walk on quietly here. I can talk to you better here.”
The roadway, however, proved so disconcerting, owing to great gusts of wind which kept driving the sand and dust along its surface, that before Vennie had summoned up courage to begin her story, they found it necessary to debouch to their left and enter the marshy flats of Lodmoor. They took their way along the edge of a broad ditch, whose black peat-bottomed waters were overhung by clumps of “Michaelmas daisies” and sprinkled with weird glaucous-leafed plants. It was a place of a singular character, owing to the close encounter in it of land and sea, and it seemed to draw the appeal of its strange desolation almost equally from both these sources.
Vennie, on the verge of speaking, found her senses in a state of morbid alertness. Everything she felt and saw at that moment lodged itself with poignant sharpness in her brain and returned to her mind long afterwards. So extreme was her nervous tension that she found it difficult to disentangle her thoughts from all these outward impressions.
The splash of a water-rat became an episode in her suspended revelation. The bubbles rising from the movements of an eel in the mud got mixed with the image of Mrs. Wotnot picking laurel-leaves. The flight of a sea-gull above their heads was a projection of Dangelis’ escape from the spells of his false mistress. The wind shaking the reeds was the breath of her fatal news ruffling the man’s smiling attention. The wail of the startled plovers was the cry of her own heart, calling upon all the spirits of truth and justice, to make him believe her words.