"This house will be plain grey stone," she said, "and its roof will be of tiles, to prevent the effect being too cold. We shall try to pick up tiles that are already weathered, so that it may not look too new. I will not introduce anything that is a deliberate imitation of what was old, such as timbering, barge-boards, or painted woodwork. You shall have no grotesques; you must not yearn for a letter-box shaped like the Ace of Spades, as they have in Hampstead, nor for garrets with the window set at the end of a tunnel, as one sees in all the new toy suburbs. Our gables will be few; our roof shall not be cut to pieces. All our lines shall be simple, and our chimney-stacks things of beauty."
Her face was rapt as she sat looking at the bare ground where in fancy she saw her creation taking shape. Captain Brooke, sitting at her side, let himself go for a brief moment, gazing his fill upon the face that was always graven on his heart. It did not take her long to become conscious of the scrutiny of his steady eyes. The moment that he saw she had come out of her dream, he rose, and walked away to the excavations his workmen had made, returning with lumps of marl and chalky soil in his hands, and quietly making a remark about foundations.
As they plunged into the discussion of builders, estimates, contracts, etc., she realised that she was full of reluctant admiration for him. How well he bore himself! How completely he was master of his feelings! She felt, she knew, that he was entirely to be trusted. His speech was correct, his bearing dignified; nobody would now take him for anything but an English gentleman. Five years had wrought all this in him. How persistently he must have striven; how hard he must have worked!
And all this, she must conclude, had been done for her—for one whose heart was wholly untouched by any answering feeling—to whom the mere thought of him was pain and humiliation—who asked nothing better than never to see him again.
As the thought of her present position flooded her again, she felt so strong an impulse of resentment that for a long moment she was inclined to throw down her plans, rise and denounce him—repudiate his claims, break the chain that seemed to hold her, leave him where he stood, and flee from him for ever. How could she go on like this, now that she knew? Did not every moment that passed leave her more deeply committed to the incredible situation?
Never did she remember before to have been the victim of indecision. Now she, the self-poised, self-sufficient Miss Lutwyche, was swayed to and fro like a reed in the grip of opposing passions. Terror drew her one way, pride and ambition another. Under all, the mainspring of all, though she knew it not, the desire to defy Bert, to pay him back in his own coin, to seize his masquerade and turn it into a weapon for her own use, to punish him withal.
And all the while the rollicking April wind sang in the tree-tops, the sun moved westward, the light grew mellow, till the lump of earth in the captain's hand gleamed like a lump of gold. And his architect walked to and fro beside him; paused here, moved on again upon a new impulse; measured out the dimensions of things with her long builder's tape, and caused the owner to stick little white bits of wood, marked with weird symbols, into the ground at certain intervals. So they stood and talked, each ignorant of the storms that swept the other.
The surface of the girl's manner—easy, impersonal, remote—was never once impressed by the tremendous undercurrent that lay below the man's cool utterances. She was thinking: "After all, this is quite easy. I could keep it up for ever."
He was telling himself—"This sort of thing can't go on. Could I bear another day like this?"
Suddenly, it was over. She looked at her watch and announced that she must catch the 5.10. For a moment the thought that the strain he had been feeling so acutely was to be forthwith relaxed, gave him so sharp a sense of loss that he could not immediately speak. When he did, it was to beg her to come back first to tea at the inn. She firmly declined this. The inn, to her, was horror-haunted. The ghost of her past had risen there to dog the footsteps which she had believed were free. She replied that she would have an hour at the junction in which to get tea, and must not stop now.