Elizabeth again took to patting the small bundle of warmth in her lap. Over the low hedge of the garden, she could see the churchyard, and the white and grey headstones of the graves. From the old church came the intermittent sound of hammering, and the occasional clinking of metal. Pigeons wheeled against the blue sky, alighting now and again on the church tower. Beyond the church stretched meadows, and the silver line of a river twisting among them past rushes and pollard willows.
A heat haze covered the landscape; it shimmered, elusively golden, above the red-flagged path of the garden. A cat dozed on a bit of sun-baked earth; it appeared the embodiment of feline contentment. Elizabeth felt something of the same contentment. There was still that little gleam of amusement in her eyes.
Unquestionably she was a conspirator.
CHAPTER XXXVII
CORIN TAKES A WALK
It is, however, one thing to be a conspirator in intention, and quite another to put your conspiracy into action. The opportunity perversely refused to present itself, or, at any rate, to Elizabeth’s eyes it refused to present itself, and that, after all, came to the same thing. A dozen times at least she went over her prepared formula in her mind, intending at each meeting to put it into words.
And there were meetings enough. You might have imagined that David sought them; that he knew, by some uncanny instinct, the exact moments when Elizabeth would approach the Green Man. Of course, too, there were the meetings at breakfast, but to Elizabeth’s mind these barely counted. It was not a subject to be served up with coffee and eggs and bacon; the hour, also, was unpropitious. She was never glib of speech in the early morning. But then every hour seemed unpropitious.
The whole difficulty of the matter lay in the fact that she was on the outlook for an opportunity, that her formula was prepared. I defy any one—at all events any one of Elizabeth’s truthful nature—to introduce a pre-arranged subject casually and naturally. If you have ever tried to do so yourself, you will hear the instant ring of falsity in your words.
“Oh, by the way——”
And if you don’t begin in this fashion, how on earth are you going to begin, I ask?
Every meeting which passed without the subject being broached, lent further difficulty to its broaching. And the moment the opportunity had gone by, Elizabeth would upbraid herself for cowardice, would speak confidently to her heart of next time. And when next time came, the little dumb devil would sit maliciously on guard before her lips allowing every word to pass them but those she desired to speak.