“Do you?” he answers, half under his breath; and again they walk on.
They are outside the Park gates, have followed the road that leads past the King’s Woods, and have reached the brow of the hill, half-way down which the village lights show their yellow points, and the church steeple tells its jackdaws, now silent in bed, to the tune of “The Last Rose of Summer,” that it is seven o’clock. Upon the silvering sky the Kentish oast-houses draw their extinguisher outline.
“I have always wondered,” says Campion, slowly, as they begin to descend the steep slope side by side, “why, feeling as you do, you did not pitch upon Bill instead of me.”
“I did not pitch upon you,” replies she, quietly. “I believe that I was born engaged to you, as I was born Uncle George’s niece. It seems to me as if the one has been as little a matter of choice as the other!”
There is, if no romance, at least so rock-like a certainty in her way of stating their relationship, that the young man feels a sudden lightening of a heart that has been heavy enough.
“That, perhaps, is why we never can decide whether I asked you or you me?”
“Oh yes, we can!” retorts she, also in a gayer vein. “As soon as I could speak I suggested our marrying when we grew up. You demurred, and asked whether we might not live together without marrying? I rejoined that that would be wicked, and that Nanna said we should go to hell if we did, whereupon you reluctantly consented.”
Both laugh, and arrive at the tree-hung entrance to their modest house in better humour with each other than had at one time seemed probable. But once inside the hall-door, the little spurt of cheerfulness dies down.
“Is he in his own room?” Lavinia asks under her breath, and the answer, “He was when I came out,” uttered with equal precaution, sends her treading lightly towards a shut door, through the old-fashioned fanlight over which a light is visible. Neither she nor her cousin-lover suggests that he shall accompany her.
As she enters the idea strikes her with a half-whimsical sadness, for what different types of sorrow she has within an hour had to provide consolation. Equally different is the setting to those sorrows. In his little Spartan room, with its large knee-hole writing-table, and its sparse decorations of old coloured stage-coach prints, portraits of departed hunters and famous jockeys, Sir George Campion sits in his leather chair, reading his Country Life with a resolutely everyday look. There is only one bit of driftwood to show the shipwreck in which his old heart went down two months ago; and that is the few little objects neatly arranged on the small table that carries his reading-lamp, within reach of that hand and eye, which yet would seem ostentatiously unaware of them. Lavinia’s action ignores the poor little pretence. She goes straight up to the sitting figure, and lays her hand gently but firmly on his shoulder.