“How absorbed we are in distant contemplation! A happy sign, I hope, in these turbulent times. Miss Darling, will you condescend to include me in your view?”
“I only understand simple English,” answered Dolly. “Most of the other comes from France, perhaps. We believed that you were gone abroad again.”
“I wish that the subject had more interest for you,” Carne answered, with his keen eyes fixed on hers, in the manner that half angered and half conquered her. “My time is not like that of happy young ladies, with the world at their feet, and their chief business in it, to discover some new amusement.”
“You are not at all polite. But you never were that, in spite of your French education.”
“Ah, there it is again! You are so accustomed to the flattery of great people that a simple-minded person like myself has not the smallest chance of pleasing you. Ah, well! It is my fate, and I must yield to it.”
“Not at all,” replied Dolly, who could never see the beauty of that kind of resignation, even in the case of Dan Tugwell. “There is no such thing as fate for a strong-willed man, though there may be for poor women.”
“May I tell you my ideas about that matter? If so, come and rest for a moment in a quiet little shelter where the wind is not so cold. For there is no such thing as Spring in England.”
Dolly hesitated, and with the proverbial result. To prove himself more polite than she supposed, Caryl Carne, hat in hand and with low bows preserving a respectful distance, conducted her to a little place of shelter, so pretty and humble and secluded by its own want of art, and simplicity of skill, that she was equally pleased and surprised with it.
“Why, it is quite a little bower!” she exclaimed; “as pretty a little nest as any bird could wish for. And what a lovely view towards the west and beyond Pebbleridge! One could sit here forever and see the sun set. But I must have passed it fifty times without the least suspicion of it. How on earth have you managed to conceal it so? That is to say, if it is your doing. Surely the children must have found it out, because they go everywhere.”
“One brat did. But I gave him such a scare that he never stopped roaring till next Sunday, and it frightened all the rest from looking round that corner. If any other comes, I shall pitch-plaster him, for I could not endure that noise again. But you see, at a glance, why you have failed to see it, as we always do with our little oversights, when humbly pointed out to us. It is the colour of the ground and the background too, and the grayness of the scanty growth that hides it. Nobody finds it out by walking across it, because of this swampy place on your side, and the shoot of flints down from the cliff on the other, all sharp as a knife, and as rough as a saw. And nobody comes down to this end of the warren, neither is it seen from the battery on the hill. Only from the back is it likely to be invaded, and there is nothing to make people look, or come, up here. So you have me altogether at your mercy, Miss Darling.”