“I say,” remarked Lady Susan, “when are we to go on and see this wonderful waterfall, or whatever it is? Where are the cigarettes? Let’s light up before we start.”
“I think you’d better not,” said Glasgow, “the men will be back directly.”
“Well, what do they matter?”
“I think you’d better not,” he repeated, in that intimate tone that seemed so uncalled for.
Lady Susan put up her eyebrows with an expression of petulant inquiry, and something as near a pout as was possible for a person not versed in the habit, but she shut her cigarette-case. Major Bunbury thought he had never seen her look so foolish.
“Is she going to lose her head about him?” was the question that was suddenly driven in upon him. Until to-day, he thought she was merely occupying idleness and exhibiting indifferent taste.
He and Slaney walked behind her and Glasgow along the muddy road, in that double tête-à-tête now become inevitable; the wind blew cold and sweet off the lake and off the bog—cold, and sweet, and inimitably Irish, like Slaney herself, as Major Bunbury was at this moment capable of expressing it, if he had known that he was making the comparison. His mind had unconsciously stored up many such impressions of her, to what end it had not occurred to him to inquire. The road crossed a trout-stream, and by the bridge Glasgow and Lady Susan turned off and began to follow the bank of the little river through a stunted and intricate wood. In the track by which they made their way it was not possible to walk side by side; Bunbury went first, sometimes holding back a branch, sometimes giving her his hand when the rocks of the river brink thrust their slippery shoulders across the way. They spoke little, and by the gift of imaginative sympathy that was hers for those who interested her, she knew that his silence was vexed with misgiving about Lady Susan.
The river was brimming full, and, as it raced, the black water and the cold froth washed in deep eddies between the rocks; the sunlit bank opposite was red with withered bracken and sedge; the soft booming of a waterfall came to the ear. Passing round the curve they saw the thick and creamy column of water plunge from its edge of low crag to its ruin among the boulders; above it two or three battered fir-trees stood on the high ground, grey and straight and rigid beside the lavish rush and confusion.
Lady Susan was leaning against one of the fir-trees, smoking her cigarette, and looking fixedly and dreamily at the water; Glasgow, with her fur-lined coat on his arm, was standing very close to her, looking as if he had said something to which she had not as yet replied. She did not move when Slaney and Bunbury joined them, and was unaffectedly uninterested in general conversation. Slaney had never thought her so handsome; her eyes seemed to look out of her heart and into a remote place unseen of others, instead of summing up things around her with her wonted practical glance.
It was against all theories of woman-kind, yet the fact remained that Slaney liked Lady Susan.