Carnaby made no reply. He was looking out into the garden and feeling half a boy, half a man, but wholly, though not very contentedly, a kinsman.
XI
THE SANDS AT WESTON
“Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I must run up to London on Saturday,” said Lavendar to himself as he finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes, there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees; in another, years might have passed since the moment when he first saw Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman’s plum tree.
“Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that time when we first crossed in the boat, I’ve never been more than half an hour alone with her,” he thought. “There are only three other people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they’re not wanted) so that we’re eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly! I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his presence isn’t always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he’s quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it’s my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I’ll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can’t want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He’ll come anywhere.” Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic 129 despair. “Mrs. Loring can’t like it! She must be doing it on purpose, avoiding being alone with me because she sees I admire her,” he sighed. “After all why should I ever suppose that I interest her as much as she does me?”
No one could have told from Lavendar’s face, when he appeared fresh and smiling at the breakfast table half an hour later, that he was hatching any deep-laid schemes.