Every one feels the curious tingling thrill that comes of having seen a feat that will become historic. Garlett’s great catch that won the Australian match for his eleven will be talked about and written about for years to come, wherever cricket is had in honour.
Garlett has picked himself up from where he fell after his terrific leap—but still, you may be sure, holding the precious ball safely to his chest—and instantly he is the centre of a throng of cheering and congratulatory friends, among whom the Cornstalks themselves are foremost.
CHAPTER I
In the star-powdered sky there hung a pale, golden moon. It was the 25th of May, and though the day had been warm and sunny, it was cold to-night, and even as early as ten o’clock most of the lights were extinguished in Terriford village.
But “the moon is the lovers’ sun”: such was the conceit which a tall, loosely built man had just propounded to the girl walking by his side on the field path which lay like a white ribbon across the four cornfields stretching between the Thatched House Farm and the well-kept demesne of the Thatched House.
The girl—Lucy Warren was her name, and she was parlour-maid at the Thatched House—made no answer. She could well have spared the moonlight. She knew that not only her clever, capable mother, but also all the gossips who made up her little world, would be shocked indeed did they see her walking, in this slow, familiar, loverlike way, with her mother’s lodger, Guy Cheale.
Not that shrewd Mrs. Warren disliked her lodger. In spite of herself she had become very fond of him. He was such a queer, fantastic—had she known the word, she might have added cynical—young gentleman.
But though she liked him, and though his funny talk amused her, Mrs. Warren would have been wroth indeed had she known of the friendship between her lodger and her daughter. And the mother would have been right to feel wroth, for, while doing everything to make Lucy love him with that fresh, wonderful young love that only comes to a woman once, Guy Cheale never spoke to Lucy of marriage.
For the matter of that, how could he speak of marriage, being that melancholy thing, a penniless gentleman? A man whose lodging at the farm even was paid for by his sister, herself companion-housekeeper at the Thatched House. There were a dozen newspapers in London which would always print everything Guy Cheale chose to write, but he liked talking better than writing, and he was in very poor health.
Lucy hated to think that the man whom deep in her heart she had come passionately to love was too lazy—or was it really too ill?—to make a living. She disliked her lover’s sister, Agatha Cheale, with a deep, instinctive, fierce dislike, and sometimes she smiled, though it was not a happy smile, at the thought of how angry Miss Cheale would be if she knew that Mr. Cheale and she, Lucy, were lovers.