He moved, not to the windows from which he could look down on the lights of the Promenade and Pier, but to those that were turned to the dark and unseen mountains. Somehow this reason he had for hoping that the car would not stop long seemed to come from there. He told himself that he would be better presently. He had these—bad humours, call them—sometimes. He hid them from June, but Minetta had noticed them, and he knew all about them himself. He turned to June again.
"I wonder what's happened," he said.
"It's—it's quite safe, isn't it?" June asked.
"Oh, quite." His lips compressed a little. It was quite safe—neither more nor less safe than everything else in John Willie's life. That, somehow, was at the bottom of these ill-humours of his.
"Dash it," he muttered....
"It is a nuisance," June agreed. "But I don't suppose Minetta will be anxious."
"I wasn't thinking of Minetta," John Willie replied.
Now when you are reluctant to enter into explanation, and there is something you badly want to do, you never (if you are an ordinary young man) look very far for a reason. The first that comes will serve your turn. If it is a flimsy one, no matter; you then get angry when its flimsiness is pointed out to you, and presently out of your anger and obstinacy you will have found a reason as good as another. John Willie did not at all like those interior smiling taunts of himself that took the form of congratulations on his neatly planned life and pillowed and feathered death to close it. If anybody of his own weight had taunted him thus he would have knocked that person down. But you cannot knock down a whisper that seems to come on the wind from the mountains through the night, making you, your ordered comfort notwithstanding, absolutely wretched. Again John Willie turned to June.
"I say, June; this won't do, you know," he said.
June looked enquiringly at him.