"Yes. In the end I thought I would. There was no hurry, but there was no sense in positively wasting time. You say he's at St Briac. Where's that? I don't know this coast."
"Six or seven miles. A tram takes you all the way."
"Then we'll look him up. But I want to do a bit of shopping with Madge first. Must have a couple of hats. I hardly bought a single thing to come away with."
And her manner ever since had been for all the world as if something was inevitable, would come of itself, in its own good time, whether she lifted a finger to further it or not.
It may sound fantastic to you, but I could almost have believed that when she had taken that yellow thing from her own shoulders and had put it over mine, she had invested me with something more than a garment, something almost of herself. I had seen Jennie's disdainful glance at the coquetry with which she had cast it about me; almost insolently she had allowed her own towelling to drop where it would; and Julia now enveloped me in a double sense. Cloak or no cloak, she claimed all my thoughts, all my gazing. For I and I only knew why she was in France. Her errand was the deadlier the less haste she made. I had sought to interpose between him and Jennie because Jennie was too young; could I now step between him and Julia because Julia was too old? Moreover, both women now knew his terrific secret. The exquisite complication I had dreaded to entertain was upon us in its perfection. What, between the three of them, was to happen now?
| For Julia he was on his way back to sixteen. | For Jennie he hoped to go forward again. |
| Julia's influence over him had been to rob him of eleven years in a single night. | But I could guess what calm and healing had brooded over him as he stood with Jennie in the Tower. |
| Julia had strangely made herself his scapegoat and had left him lighthearted, innocent, free. | Jennie knew nothing of this, and yet had an instinct that Julia Oliphant was a person to be kept at arm's length. |
| Julia was still unaware that apparently his years had ceased to ebb. | Jennie, his partial confession in the Tower notwithstanding, was unaware that the matter had any great seriousness. |
| Julia had her knowledge of his former youth. | Jennie was in possession of his present one. |
| Julia would walk through flame to find him. | Jennie would do no less to keep him. |
One drop of comfort I found in the whole extravaganza, and one only. Jennie's naughtiness might reach extremes of civility, but so far at any rate Julia was tolerantly good-humoured about it. For she could hardly be unconscious of the—well, the bracing temperature of the atmosphere. But how long was that likely to last? Once more Derry seemed to have us all entangled in the web of his unique condition. Already my own surreptitious visits to him had made me feel little better than a slinking conspirator; the presence of Jennie's bicycle in that St Briac kitchen did not improve matters; and now, to cap all, Julia and I were to seek him out.
Again I found myself weakly wishing that I could wash my hands of him. And again I knew that I could not. It seemed to me that there was nothing to do, not even anything to refrain from doing. The whole thing ran itself. It ran itself independently of any of us, as it had run itself with equal smoothness and efficiency whether Julia had stayed in England or had come over here.
And I sat contemplating it, wrapped in her vivid cloak, wrapped in her lurid thoughts, my looks alternately seeing and avoiding her shape in the water, while the sun flashed on the grapes and apricots and oranges of that fruit-salad in the waves of St Enogat's plage.