Esther laughs.
"These reflections are à propos of—what?"
"Of Conny's most ill-timed entry last night," he answers, with energy. "I don't suppose she makes such a midnight raid once in five years, and she certainly could not have found you and me tête-à-tête at two in the morning more than once in fifty years. Why could not she leave us in peace that once? We did not grudge her any amount of pleasant dreams; why need she grudge us our pleasant wakefulness?"
"Do you think she came on purpose, then?" asks Essie, her eyes opening as round in alarmed surprise as a baby's when a grown-up person makes ugly faces at it.
He shrugs his shoulders slightly. "Cannot say, I'm sure. Conny is not much in the habit of burning the midnight oil in the pursuit of knowledge generally. If it was accident, she came in at a wonderfully à propos, or rather mal à propos, moment. Tell me," he says, crossing over to her side of the road, and fixing frankly-asking eyes upon her; "I may be mistaken—it is a misfortune to which I am often incident—but I could not help thinking that, just as that unlucky candle appeared round the corner last night, you were going to tell me something—something about yourself? I thought I saw it in your face. I think I deserved some little reward for raking up for your behoof the ashes of that old fire that I burnt my fingers at so badly once."
Esther still remains silent, but turns her long neck from one side to the other with a restless, uneasy motion.
"Are lamplight and the small hours indispensable accessories?" he asks, with gentle pleading in look and words—"or could not you tell me as well now?"
"Tell you what?" she says, turning round sharp upon him, and snapping, as a little cross dog snaps at the heels of the passer-by—"must I invent something?"
"Are you sure that it is necessary to invent?" he asks, scanning the fair, troubled face with searching gaze.
She pulls a bunch of nuts out of the hedge from among their rough-ribbed green leaves, and begins to pick them out of their sheath. "What am I to tell you?" she says, petulantly, a suspicion that he may have heard a rumour of her engagement crossing her mind: "that I live in an old farmhouse with my brother Jack, and that we are very hard up—you know already; that 'Su dry da chi' is Welsh for 'How do you do?' and that our asparagus has answered very badly this year?"