He answered, gravely for him, "No, those sorts of riddles are very hard to solve." He hesitated, then exclaimed in a meaning tone, "Still, they are solved sometimes, Mrs. Winslow."
It was late the same night, a warm, St. Martin's summer night, and Mrs. Tropenell, sitting alone after dinner, made an excuse of a telephone message to join her son and Gillie Baynton out of doors.
After Baynton's return from The Chase the two men had gone off for a long walk together over the downs, and they had come home so late that dinner had had to be put off for half an hour. Instead of joining her later, they had gone out again, but this time only into the garden.
Noiselessly she moved across the grass, and then, just as she was going to step under the still leaf-draped pergola, she heard her son's voice—a voice so charged with emotion and pain that, mastered by her anxiety, she stopped just behind one of the brick arches, and listened.
"You'll oblige me, Baynton, by keeping your sister's name out of this."
"Oh, very well! I thought you'd be glad to know what that woman said to me—I mean Mrs. Winslow."
"I'm not glad. I'm sorry. Mrs. Winslow is mistaken."
The short sentence came out with laboured breath as if with difficulty, and the one who overheard them, the anguished eavesdropper, felt her heart stirred with bitter impotence.
How Oliver cared—how much Oliver cared!