But Ivor was not doing very much thinking this morning as he paced up and down, just far enough behind the river-bank not to offend the fishes’ sensitive nerves. Get on their nerves perhaps, he thought. He had come to a conclusion by the time he had fallen asleep last night; and his awakening had confirmed it. One quarrels, he thought, almost naturally, being human; and then, being human, one makes it up. But in a few days, not straight away! I know what I want in this thing—and Virginia must get to know what she wants, or else we’re in a blind alley. There’s no sense in being nasty and then falling on each other’s necks without having got rid of all the nastiness. She simply must not be able to look at me like that in that horrible way. Caddish eyes.... And there was something so, well, blasphemous about those “caddish eyes” that he had to force his mind away from them, else the thought of them would make him angry again. There are rotten mysteries in us all....
The morning was not very eventful as to fishing. Perhaps there was too much light, Ivor vaguely suggested. The afternoon, however, very quickly put that all right, for the hesitating sun was quite obscured by three o’clock, and a little later it began to spit; and by four it was raining steadily, a wet and steady drizzle. They had passed to the farther side of the bridge, where Turner had seen “them rising”; and it was there that a telegraph boy, a very wet and sulky little boy who might have been any kind of boy but for the coloured envelope in his hand, found them. He had tried the house, he said sulkily. Turner quickly tore open the envelope and handed the wire to Ivor.
“Seen anything?” the boy cheekily asked Turner.
Turner looked sharply at him and then down at the basket. The boy thoughtfully examined the three grayling in the basket and remarked that they would be getting wet in the rain.
“No answer,” a voice told him; and the little boy ploughed sulkily back through the sodden grass to his bicycle against the bridge.
“Getting too wet now,” Ivor remarked; and long strides took him towards the bridge and the house. Turner followed slowly; he would have liked another cast or two, but Turner never fished alone, for the unwritten law of Turner’s fishing was that his master was going to have “another go in a minute.”
Within the house Ivor had another look at the wire. “Come back.” That’s all! Dear Virginia! She must have rung up his flat and heard where he was from Mrs. Hope.
But one either does a thing or one doesn’t. One can’t go dashing about the country because of whims and wires. It’s no good our being babies about this, Virginia, he thought. We must get sensible, somehow—find out what we want and then not mess about with it like this. “Come back.” Of course he would go back, he had never intended otherwise. But in a day or two—say the day after to-morrow, when our minds are rested from the folly of the thing and we’ll never need to speak of it again. Of course he didn’t want to attach too much importance to childishness—but still ... those eyes! He couldn’t entirely forgive those strangely livid eyes, they had startled and hurt him frightfully, and they kept on coming into his mind. Caddish.... The day after to-morrow, he thought firmly. Not going back until I’ve forgotten that look.
After dinner he read the Life of Disraeli, the third volume. And once, when he looked up, he caught a vivid glimpse of a lovely grave face between golden “Swan and Edgar.” And at that very moment he almost went to London, to run to the heart of that “mausoleum.”