“Yes, mother.”
She then resumed her book.
CHAPTER 2
JAMES SETS OUT
(Miss Margaret Goodwin’s narrative continued)
Those August days! Have there been any like them before? I realise with difficulty that the future holds in store for me others as golden.
The island was crammed with trippers. They streamed in by every boat. But James and I were infinitely alone. I loved him from the first, from the moment when he had rowed out of the unknown into my life, clad in a dressing-gown. I like to think that he loved me from that moment, too. But, if he did, the knowledge that he did came to him only after a certain delay. It was my privilege to watch this knowledge steal gradually but surely upon him.
We were always together; and as the days passed by he spoke freely of himself and his affairs, obeying unconsciously the rudder of my tactful inquisitiveness. By the end of the first week I knew as much about him as he did himself.
It seemed that a guardian—an impersonal sort of business man with a small but impossible family—was the most commanding figure in his private life. As for his finances, five-and-forty sovereigns, the remnant of a larger sum which had paid for his education at Cambridge, stood between him and the necessity of offering for hire a sketchy acquaintance with general literature and a third class in the classical tripos.
He had come to Guernsey to learn by personal observation what chances tomato growing held out to a young man in a hurry to get rich.
“Tomato growing?” I echoed dubiously. And then, to hide a sense of bathos, “People have made it pay. Of course, they work very hard.”