She told him with some shame that it was hers.
"A case of bolting—I suppose it wanted the curb. And now I shall have to drag it back to the hotel."
"Don't do anything of the kind. We leave these things all over the place—the hotel sledges pick them up as far down as the Sanatorium sometimes. Just let it lie there. I'll take you down if you like—there's plenty of room for two, and—and—I should like it, Mrs. Kennaird; I should think it an honour."
It was so simply said, the blunt words of a schoolboy speaking to the mature woman, that she forbore to smile. It would have been absurd, however, to respond in a similar vein, for the idea of a flirtation with Mr. Benjamin Benson was quite out of the question. So she accepted without any compliment at all.
"It's very good of you—and really I am beginning to feel the cold. Will you show me where to sit? I am absolutely ignorant, and it is so many years since I played games."
He understood that.
"Life's a game all through. We all say it, but what else can we say? We're in the long field most of the time, and when we get an innings, Fate goes and bowls us a curly one. I've never had an innings in my life, and I've been fielding for fifteen years—since I was seventeen—and my poor old father played on in Mark Lane and lost his house the 'ashes.' That's my story, and I don't tell it to everyone. Perhaps I have no right to tell it to you—but you seem so different, Mrs. Kennaird; I feel I can talk to you, and that's what I feel about very few people."
"You pay me a great compliment," she said, and then, "But we are both quite strangers here. This is my first visit to Switzerland in the winter; I know nobody."
He nodded his head.
"But I thought that I knew you directly I saw you—I shall remember where we met by and by. Had you relatives down Newmarket way, I wonder—people who used to live at Holmswell?"