“The line!” Rupert echoes doubtfully.
“Yes, the line!” she repeats in a passion of irritation at his hesitancy. “Are you afraid of being run over, or of the penalty of forty shillings?”
The gate is locked, but they are on its other side in a minute, and racing along the grass edge that borders the metals. For the time every idea is abolished from both their minds, but that of reaching home with the least possible delay. In a perfect unanimity of distressful haste they speed along, scarcely spending words for fear of wasting breath after the first outburst of remorseful ejaculations.
“How could we have forgotten him?”
“The specialist told me that the least friction or worry was above all things to be avoided.”
They run along for a while in perfect silence, their long legs skimming over the abounding spring flowers that always seem to relish the railway bank.
Then Lavinia cries out, “What time is it now?”
Without a break in his run, Rupert pulls out his watch, looks at it, holds it to his ear, and answers in a key of acute annoyance—
“It has stopped!”
“And Rivers Sutton Church clock does not strike the quarters?”