As in ocean’s storm, between the rough surging billows foam-crested, are spots of smooth water, so in thought’s tempest are intervals of calm. It is during one of these he speaks as above; and continuing to reflect in the same strain, things, if not quite couleur de rose, assume a less repulsive aspect. Gwen Wynn may have been but dissembling—playing with him—and he would now be contented, ready—even rejoiced—to accept it in that sense; ay, to the abject humiliation that but the moment before he had so defiantly rejected. So reversed his sentiments now—modified from mad anger to gentle forgiveness—he is almost in the act of springing to his feet, tearing the straps from his packed paraphernalia, and letting all loose again!
But just at this crisis he hears the town clock tolling six, and voices in conversation under his window. It is a hit of gossip between two stable-men—attaches of the hotel—an ostler and fly-driver.
“Ye had a big time last night at Llangorren?” says the former, inquiringly.
“Ah! that ye may say,” returns the Jarvey, with a strongly accentuated hiccup, telling of heel-taps. “Never knowed a bigger, s’help me. Wine runnin’ in rivers, as if ’twas only table-beer—an’ the best kind o’t too. I’m so full o’ French champagne, I feel most like burstin’.”
“She be a grand gal, that Miss Wynn. An’t she?”
“In course is—one o’ the grandest. But she an’t going to be a girl long. By what I heerd them say in the sarvints’ hall, she’s soon to be broke into pair-horse harness.”
“Wi’ who?”
“The son o’ Sir George Shenstone.”
“A good match they’ll make, I sh’d say. Tidier chap than he never stepped inside this yard. Many’s the time he’s tipped me.”
There is more of the same sort, but Captain Ryecroft does not hear it; the men having moved off beyond earshot. In all likelihood he would not have listened, had they stayed. For again he seems to hear those other words—that last spiteful rejoinder—“Yes; let it.”