As Furneaux had said, Hilton Fenley was cold-blooded as a fish.
CHAPTER XIII
Close Quarters
Human affairs are peculiarly dependent on the weather. It is not easy to lay down a law governing this postulate, which, indeed, may be scoffed at by the superficial reasoner, and the progression from cause to effect is often obscured by contradictory facts. For instance, a fine summer means a good harvest, much traveling, the prolongation of holiday periods, a free circulation of money, and the consequent enhanced prosperity and happiness of millions of men and women. But there are more suicides in June and July than in December and January. On the one hand, fine weather improves humanity's lot; on the other, it depresses the individual.
Let the logician explain these curiously divergent issues as he may; there can be no question that the quality of the night which closed a day eventful beyond any other in the annals of Roxton exercised a remarkable influence on the lives of five people. It was a perfect night in June. There was no moon; the stars shone dimly through a slight haze; but the sun had set late and would rise early, and his complete disappearance followed so small a chord of the diurnal circle that his light was never wholly absent. A gentle westerly breeze was so zephyr-like that it hardly stirred the leaves of the trees, but it wafted the scent of flowers and meadow land into open windows, and was grateful alike to the just and the unjust.
Thus to romantic minds it was redolent of romance; and as Sylvia Manning's room faced south and John Trenholme's faced north, and lay nearly opposite each other, though separated by a rolling mile of park, woodland, tillage and pasture, it is not altogether incredible that those two, gazing out at the same hour, should bridge the void with the eyes of the soul.
It was a night, too, that invited to the open.
In some favored lands, where the almanac is an infallible Clerk of the Weather, fine nights succeed each other with the monotonous regularity of kings in an Amurath dynasty. But the British climate, a slave to no such ordered sequence, scatters or withholds these magic hours almost impartially throughout the seasons, so that June may demand overcoats and umbrellas, and October invite Summer raiment.