“They are, of course they are,” he protested, laughing. “At least a second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet”—his humour came back—“even yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other path.”
“What, and waste ten minutes more!” she cried “Follow me, follow me!”
And she sped swiftly over the trim grass, bruising the odours of the night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself, very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity. He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book again to please or to deceive the Philistine.
“I thought we could bring it all back again—that was the object of my rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past.”
They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly.
“And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you ever written anything?”
He found himself extremely warm. Her question for the first time suggested his own possibilities. No, he had never made poetry, he confessed, though he had often felt it, as good as some of the poetry he had read in Marget Maclean’s books that were still the favourites of his leisure hours.
“It’ll be in that like other things,” she said with some sense of her own cruelty. “You must be dreaming it when you might be making it.”
“I never had the inspiration——”
“What, you say that to a lady who has been talking fair to you!” she pointed out.