"I suppose you can give us some luncheon?" said the young man, and in the interest of that important question it hardly seemed as if there had been a pause at all.
The landlady arrived in a flurry, asking what they would please to order, and Adrian and she kept up a brisk dialogue for the next five minutes. Finally, it was decided that they should have chops. Perhaps the discussion satisfied some traditional sense of what was the right thing to do on arriving at an inn. There was nothing to have but the chops which Adrian had chosen, and he murmured something of "fixed fate, free-will" under his moustache, as he crossed the road in the direction of the church.
"In an hour," he said. "That will give us time to see the church and the village. Then, after luncheon, we will go to the old Place, and the fly shall call for us there, and take us back the short way. Will that do, Barbara?"
Of course it would do; and when they reached the churchyard she bade him wait a moment and she would get the key. The stony path to Mrs. Spearman's cottage was curiously familiar—the broken palings, the pump, the leafless alder-bush. The only difference was that it was Barbara Scarlett—a different person—who was stepping over the rough pebbles.
She returned to Adrian, who was leaning against the gate-post.
"Mitchelhurst isn't very beautiful," he said, with an air of conviction. "I thought I remembered it, but it has come upon me rather as a shock. Somehow, I fancied—Barbara, is it possible that I have taken all the beauty out of it—that it belongs to me now, instead of to Mitchelhurst? Can that be?"
She smiled her answer to the question, and then—
"I think it looks very much as usual," she said, gazing dispassionately round. "Of course, it is prettier in the spring—or in the summer. It was summer when you came, you know."
She had a vague recollection of having pleaded the cause of Mitchelhurst at some other time in the same way, which troubled her a little.
"Yes, I know it was summer," said Adrian. "But still——"