It is clear that he has no wish to pursue the subject; and she refrains, partly in deference to his disinclination, partly from the aboriginal woman’s awed joy in the fighting man, partly oppressed by a sense of contrast. When Rupert cut his leg a year ago, over a fallen tree in the wood, he all but fainted at the sight of his own blood! But to Binning she leaves it to start a theme more to his liking.
“I suppose,” he says, turning his head sideways on his pillow in a way that hides his scar, and brings her still more perfectly within his range of vision, “that lying on the flat of one’s back like a cast sheep makes one see things at an odd angle. You will be surprised to hear that, a few minutes ago, I thought I had offended you.”
There is a pause before she answers, “I had offended myself. Don’t you think that that is a much worse thing to happen?”
“Do you mean that one can’t beg one’s own pardon?” he asks, laughing slightly, yet with curiosity stimulated by the gravity of her manner, and awaiting with eager interest the unriddling of her riddle.
But it remains unriddled. The impulse of each is apparently to flee away from the other’s topic. Lavinia looks out of the window, and says, with glad hopefulness—
“In another week you will be able to be carried out-of-doors. You will be too late for the cherry, but the apple blossom will be all ready for you, and then you will come in for the lilacs, the laburnums, the thorns—they are really wonderful in the Park here—the Siberian crabs, the acacias.”
“Anything more?” he asks, in tender derision of her long list.
“Plenty,” she answers, prepared to continue to bait his appetite for life with more of her joyous enumeration.
“But I shall not be here to see them,” he objects. “In a month I may go back, for Roots says so.”
The laughter behind her dancing eyes goes out, and the lilt has left the voice that asks, “Did Dr. Roots say so to you? or did you say so to him?”