"Is she interesting—to you?"
"She is most interesting—to me," was the ready rejoinder.
There was no answer. In the dim starlight the elder man studied the face of the younger. He thought Claud Cranmer was better-looking than he had previously considered him. There was something sweet in the expression of his mouth, something lovable in the questioning gaze of his blue-grey eyes.
The silence was broken by the fretful barking of Spot, Claud's fox-terrier. He roused himself from his reverie.
"What's up with that little beggar now, I wonder?" he said, as he rose, half-absently, and sauntered over the bridge.
"Spot! Spot! Come here! Stop that row, can't you?"
He vanished gradually among the shadows, and Henry Fowler was left alone.
"Is he in love with her, or is he not?" he dreamily asked himself. "Talk of the complications of the modern girl—there's no getting to the bottom of the modern young man. I don't believe he knows himself."
He caught his breath with something like a sigh of regret for an irreclaimable past.
"I almost wish I were young again, with a heart and a future to lay at her feet!"