"Were those tears for me?" he asked, very low.
She had hastily found her handkerchief.
"I—I think so. I can't quite explain; what you said recalled something else ... and I suppose I'm tired."
"Nevertheless," he replied, still below his breath, "I have had, at least for a moment, the sympathy of a woman. I shan't forget that. I hope you don't think I am in the habit of puling and drivelling about my lonely lot. I don't know what impelled me to sentiment, but I assure you it is all over now. See, there is Arnstock Church! We will have tea at the inn, and then the workmen will be gone home, and we can have the churchyard to ourselves."
They pulled up at a little low inn, covered with wisteria and honeysuckle. As he helped her down, she realised that her fear of him had suddenly disappeared.
Seated by a little table at an open window over-looking a quaint garden, she poured out tea for him, and enjoyed home-made bread, and honey from the row of hives which stood before the hawthorn hedge.
They talked easily and naturally, like two between whom a barrier has been swept away. Hubert told her of his search among his mother's papers, his discovery there of the name of his grandfather's native village, his coming to England, and his quest of what Lance called his ancestral acres.
Tea over, they proceeded to the churchyard, and spent a vivid half-hour with the fragments of the Saxon cross and its knot-work. Melicent was in a fever of eagerness to discover runes, but there were none. However, they found what was almost as good, a series of grotesques down the sides of the shaft.
The workmen had turned up almost all the pieces, and when Melicent suggested, in a moment of inspiration, that the Captain should pay for its restoration and erection in the churchyard, by way of inaugurating his reign at Clunbury, he took up the idea with avidity.
They drove back almost in silence; but a silence so full for both, that they hardly realised their lack of words.