“Right! Right, goddess of the silver brake. Come, hold the pass with me.” He turned to go, and she caught him up. “I mix my poets like salad, but that's because I'm in such high spirits. By Jove, Sancie, it is good to see you again.” She met his laughing eyes with hers. She swam by his side—took his net, and was happy. Her face glowed. She had the power of casting troubles behind, recuperative power, resiliency. Glyde, the olive-faced, watched them down the walk, and owned to a heart of lead. “As well shut down the west wind as a spirit like hers!” He turned to his affair.
Below the steps, in the nut-walk which led to the bridge, Chevenix altered his tone. “It's good of you to come with me, Sancie, my dear. I'm a very friendly beggar, and Nevile, you know—I say!” and he turned her a sober face—“You know, I suppose? His wife—eh? Dead, you know. Oh, but of course you did!”
She met him unfalteringly. “Yes, he told me.”
Chevenix shrugged. “I must say, you know—what? Oh, of course, it was a ghastly affair all along. But you know all that, as well as I do. Why, her temper! Oh, awful! I've seen her myself dead-white in one of her rages—she had hold of a wine-glass so hard that it snapped, and cut her hand. She looked at the blood—she didn't know how it happened. And he—well, you ought to know—was as bad, in his way. 'Pon my soul, Sancie, Vesuvius might just as well have married Etna—every bit. But there! What's the good of talking! Everybody knew how it would be.” Words failing him, he stared about him.
“But still—oh, damn it all! To hear of your wife's death—casually—on a platform—from a chap you happen to know—happen to have met somewhere—oh, well, I call it casual. That's the word, I believe—casual. Well, it is pretty casual—what? Now, just tell me what you think—between friends, of course.”
She stopped him: she was short in the breath. “I think not. If you don't mind.”
He became as serious, immediately, as he was capable of being. “I'll do as you like, my dear—but you'll let me say this, that if I could see you with all your belongings about you again, I should sing a hymn. That's all, Sancie; but it means a lot. When you went out of Great Cumberland Place, it became, somehow, another kind of place. I hardly ever go there now, you know. And now they're all married but you, and—I say, you heard that Vicky had a son and heir? Did you hear that?”
She had averted her face, but she listened intensely, nodding her head. “Yes, yes, I knew that. Papa told me. He always writes to me, you know; from the office, poor darling!”
She appealed to him urgently. “Please don't talk about them just yet. Please don't.”
He saw the mist in her eyes, and was afraid. “All right, Sancie, all right. I'm frightfully sorry. Beastly painful all this, you know.” He was much disturbed. To his simple soul a fine day, a fine-fettled river demanded, as of right, a happy mood in man, for whom all things were made. And a fine girl by his side, a good, a brave, a splendid girl—down on her luck—on such a day! What could one do? If, when you began, she choked you off! Wouldn't meet you half-way—bottled it up! And here he was, geared for fishing, and without the heart to wet a line, because of all this misery. Sanchia, sharply in profile to him, from cheek to chin, from shoulder to low breast, all one sinuous, lax, beautiful line, broke in on his rueful meditations. “There's a rise,” she said. “Look, look.”