"Roxton seems to be a rather quaint place to find you in, Mr. Trenholme," she said. "How did you happen on our tiny village? Though so far from London, we are quite a byway. Why did you pay us a visit?"
So Trenholme dropped to earth again, and they spoke of matters of slight import till the boundary wall was reached.
Sylvia hailed a man attending cattle in the farmyard, and the artist vaulted the wall, which was breast high. The girl wondered if she could do that. When opportunity served she would try. Resting her elbows on the coping-stones, she watched Trenholme as he hurried away among the buildings and made for the village. She had never before met such a man or any one even remotely like him. He differed essentially from the Fenleys, greatly as the brothers themselves differed. Without conscious effort to please, he had qualities that appealed strongly to women, and Sylvia knew now that no consideration would induce her to marry either of her "cousins."
If asked to put her thought into words, she would have boggled at the task, for intuition is not to be defined in set speech. In her own way, she had summed up the characteristics of the two men with one of whom marriage had been at least a possibility. Hilton she feared and Robert she despised, so if either was to become her husband, it would be Hilton. But five minutes of John Trenholme's companionship had given her a standard by which to measure her suitors, and both fell wofully short of its demands. She saw with startling clearness of vision that Hilton, the schemer, and Robert, the wastrel, led selfish lives. Souls they must possess, but souls starved by lack of spirituality, souls pent in dun prisons of their own contriving.
She was so lost in thought, thought that strayed from crystal-bright imageries to nebulous shapes at once dark and terrifying, that the first intimation she received of Robert Fenley's approach was his stertorous breathing. From a rapid walk he had broken into a jog trot when he saw Trenholme vanish over the wall. Of late he seldom walked or rode a horse, and he was slightly out of condition, so his heavy face was flushed and perspiring, and his utterance somewhat labored when the girl turned at his cry:
"I say, Sylvia—you've given me such a chase! Who the deuce is that fellow, an' what are you doing here?"
Robert had appeared at an inauspicious moment. Sylvia eyed him with a new disfavor. He was decidedly gross, both in manner and language. She was sure he could not have vaulted the wall.
"I'm not aware that I called for any chasing on your part," she said, with an aloofness perilously akin to disdain.
He halted, panting, and eyed her sulkily.
"No, but dash it all! You can't go walking around with any rotten outsider who forces himself into your company," was the most amiable reply he could frame on the spur of the moment.