“I’ve got a boat down there; Mrs. de Tracy doesn’t quite like your taking the ferry; may I have the honour of rowing you across? My orders were to bring you back as soon as possible.”
“I’m blest if I hurry,” was his unspoken comment as Robinette gaily agreed, and, having bidden good-bye to the old woman, with a quick caress that astonished him a good deal, she laid down the little shoe gently upon the bench, and turned to accompany him to the boat.
The river was like a looking-glass; the air like balm. “We’ll take some time getting across, against the tide,” said Lavendar reflectively, as he resolved that the little voyage 74 should be prolonged to its fullest possible extent. He was not going into the Manor a moment earlier than he could help, when this charming person was sitting opposite to him. So this was Mrs. Loring! How different from the stout middle-aged lady whom Mrs. de Tracy’s words had conjured up when he set out to find her!
“Old Mrs. Prettyman was my mother’s nurse,” Robinette remarked as Lavendar dipped his oars gently into the stream and began to row. “I went to see her feeling quite grown up, and she seemed to consider me still a child; I was feeling about four years old at the moment when you appeared and woke me to the real world again.”
She had dried her eyes now and had pulled her hat down so as to shade her face, but Lavendar could see the traces of her weeping, and the dear little ineffectual rag of a handkerchief was still in one hand.
“What on earth was she crying about?” he thought, as with lowered eyes he rowed 75 very slowly across, only just keeping the boat’s head against the current, and glancing now and then at the young woman.
Was it possible that this lovely person was going to be his fellow-guest in that dull house? “My word! but she’s pretty! and what were the tears about ... and the little shoe? Did it belong to a child of her own? Can she be a widow, I wonder,” said Lavendar to himself.
“I often think,” he said suddenly, raising his head, “that when two people meet for the first time as utter strangers to each other, they should be encouraged, not forbidden, to ask plain questions. It may be my legal training, but I’d like all conversation to begin in that way. As a child I was constantly reproved for my curiosity, especially when I once asked a touchy old gentleman, ‘Which is your glass eye? The one that moves, or the one that stands still?’”
The tears had dried, the hat was pushed back again, the young woman’s face broke 76 into an April smile that matched the day and the weather.
“Oh, come, let us do it,” she exclaimed. “I’d love to play it like a new game: we know nothing at all about each other, any more than if we had dropped from the moon into the boat together. Oh! do be quick! We’ve so little time; the river is quite narrow; who’s to open the ball?”