“Quite a nice bit of symbolism,” he returned enigmatically.
“How? I don’t think I understand.”
He laughed a little.
“How should you? You’re young. Fate doesn’t come along and snuff out the lights for you when you are—what shall we say? Eighteen?”
“You’re two years out,” replied Jean composedly.
“As much? Then let’s hope you’ll have so much the longer to wait before Madame Destiny comes round with her snuffers.”
He spoke with a kind of bitter humour, the backwash, surely, of some storm through which he must have passed. Jean looked across at him with a vague trouble in her face.
“Then, do you think”—she spoke uncertainly—“do you believe it is inevitable that she will come—sooner or later?”
“I hope not—to you,” he said gently. “But she comes to most of us.”
She longed to put another question, but there was a note of finality in his voice—a kind of “thus far shalt thou come and no further”—that warned her to probe no deeper. Whatever it was of bitterness that lay in the Englishman’s past, he had no intention of sharing the knowledge with his chance companion of a day. He seemed to have become absorbed once more in his own thoughts, and for a time they tramped along together in silence.