"Mr. Urquhart is very impulsive," she dared to say.
"I've known that for a long time," said James. "Longer than you have, I fancy. But it takes more than impulse to break another man's neck. Besides, I really have no reason to suppose that he wants to break my neck. Why should he?"
Here they were up against the wall again. If there were reasons, he could not know them. There was no getting over it yet. They were to start betimes in the morning, and sleep that night at Brattebö, which is the hithermost spur of the chain. Dinner and beds had been ordered at Odde, beyond the snow-field.
Dinner was a gay affair. They toasted the now declared lovers. True to his cornering instincts, Lingen had told Lucy all about it in the afternoon. "Your sympathy means so much to me—and Margery, whose mind is exquisitely sensitive, is only waiting your nod to be at your feet, with me."
"I should be very sorry to see either of you there," Lucy said. "I'm very fond of her and I shouldn't take it at all kindly if she demeaned herself. When do you think of marrying?"
He looked at her appealingly. "I must have time," he said; "time to build the nest."
"A flat, I suppose," she said, declining such poetical flights.
"A flat!" said Francis Lingen. "Really, it hadn't occurred to me."
From Lucy the news went abroad, and so the dinner was gay. Urquhart confined himself to the two boys, and told them about the Folgefond—of its unknown depth, of the crevasses, of the glacier on its western edge, of certain white snakes, bred by the snow, which might be found there. Their bite was death, he said.
"Frost-bite," said Patrick Nugent, who knew his uncle's way; but Lancelot favoured his mother.