“So Captain Anthony joined you—did he?”
“He opened a field-gate and walked out on the road. He crossed to my side and went on with me. He had his pipe in his hand. He said: ‘Are you going far this morning?’”
These words (I was watching her white face as she spoke) gave me a slight shudder. She remained demure, almost prim. And I remarked:
“You have been talking together before, of course.”
“Not more than twenty words altogether since he arrived,” she declared without emphasis. “That day he had said ‘Good morning’ to me when we met at breakfast two hours before. And I said good morning to him. I did not see him afterwards till he came out on the road.”
I thought to myself that this was not accidental. He had been observing her. I felt certain also that he had not been asking any questions of Mrs. Fyne.
“I wouldn’t look at him,” said Flora de Barral. “I had done with looking at people. He said to me: ‘My sister does not put herself out much for us. We had better keep each other company. I have read every book there is in that cottage.’ I walked on. He did not leave me. I thought he ought to. But he didn’t. He didn’t seem to notice that I would not talk to him.”
She was now perfectly still. The wretched little parasol hung down against her dress from her joined hands. I was rigid with attention. It isn’t every day that one culls such a volunteered tale on a girl’s lips. The ugly street-noises swelling up for a moment covered the next few words she said. It was vexing. The next word I heard was “worried.”
“It worried you to have him there, walking by your side.”
“Yes. Just that,” she went on with downcast eyes. There was something prettily comical in her attitude and her tone, while I pictured to myself a poor white-faced girl walking to her death with an unconscious man striding by her side. Unconscious? I don’t know. First of all, I felt certain that this was no chance meeting. Something had happened before. Was he a man for a coup-de-foudre, the lightning stroke of love? I don’t think so. That sort of susceptibility is luckily rare. A world of inflammable lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type would very soon end in barbarism and misery. But it is a fact that in every man (not in every woman) there lives a lover; a lover who is called out in all his potentialities often by the most insignificant little things—as long as they come at the psychological moment: the glimpse of a face at an unusual angle, an evanescent attitude, the curve of a cheek often looked at before, perhaps, but then, at the moment, charged with astonishing significance. These are great mysteries, of course. Magic signs.