"I wonder if we ought to go up?" Bob asked her. She replied, with a very white face, that it was not their business.
"There are always plenty of people at Vermala, and I know some of ours have gone up to the Zaat to-day. We could do no good, Bob—I'm sure I would go, if I thought that we could—but is it our business, when there are so many others about?"
"And the whole thing just spoof, perhaps. By George, though; if it were not!—if it were murder, Nellie?"
"Murder?—you make me shudder. How can you be so horrid, Bob?"
Bob hastened to protest that horrors were what most girls doted on; but he was obviously ill at ease, and neither said much while they went down through the wood. A little further on they disturbed, maladroitly, a pair of lovers, who started up in guilty fashion to reveal the red face of a certain Mr. Richard Fenton, and the tousled hair of that amiable and athletic nymph, Miss Marjory Rider. It was the merriest meeting in all the world, and Nellie's "Oh!" when she espied her sister would have done credit to a lady of the theatre.
"Oh, Margy, how can you look me in the face—?"
"But we're engaged, Nell—I'm going to marry Dick."
Dick looked under his eyes at Bob, but he seemed rather abashed, and by no means a lover who would have done credit to the heroics of the poets.
Upon his part, Bob said never a word about his own predicament; but Nellie had it out in a twinkling, and there the four of them stood, giggling and laughing and blushing. It remained for Bob to set matters straight by a resounding cheer, which he did presently to the great scandal of his fiancée, and the surprise of all in the vicinity of the wood. Then he discovered that he was hungry—a meagre lover sighing for baked meats.
"We shall miss the bun-scrap if we don't buck up," he said. "I'm sure old Gordon Snagg will eat all the sandwiches within half a mile of him. Let's make a dash for it, Nellie; these two will stop here spooning all day. It makes me sick to see them."