"I'll go along and tell the girls you're here—"
"Girls?"
"Miss Penny came with Margaret—"
"Aw—Miss Penny!"
"You'd better have your lunch here. They'll give you lobsters fresh from the kettle, and I'll stroll round later on and we'll get this matter settled up. So long!" and he went away up the Avenue and across the fields home.
And he went thoughtfully. It was annoying this man cropping up like this at the eleventh hour. Nothing, he felt sure, would come of his interference, but it might disturb Margaret and the general harmony of to-morrow's proceedings.
Her wedding-day is a somewhat nervous time for a girl, under the best of circumstances, he supposed. And though Margaret was as little given to nerves as anyone he had ever met, the possibility of a public attempt to stop her wedding might be fairly calculated to upset her.
Feudal as were the laws of the island, he could hardly knock Pixley on the head, as would have happened in less anachronistic times. And so he went thoughtfully.
XII
Margaret and Miss Penny were lying in long chairs on the verandah when he came over the green wall into the Red House garden, by the same gap as he had used that first morning when he came upon Margaret standing in the hedge.