She made an effort to answer him, but somehow she could think of nothing to say. The remark, uttered so quietly, astonished her, because she had never thought of O’Hara as one who would be sensitive to the beauty of a night. It was too dark to distinguish his face, but she kept seeing him as she remembered him, seeing him, too, as the others thought of him—rough and vigorous but a little common, with the scar on his temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: “It is a night full of splendor.” The men she knew—Anson’s friends—never said such things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done anything so unusual.
“The party is not a great success,” he was saying.
“No.”
“No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that.”
Olivia laughed softly. “She may have done it on purpose. You can never tell why she does anything.”
For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he said, “You aren’t cold out here?”
“No, not on a night like this.”
There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.
“I keep wondering,” she said, “how long it will be until the bungalows of Durham creep down and cover all this land.”
“They won’t, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea.”