"Hasn't it!" Sherbrand agreed, as they moved on side by side, from islands of raw, glaring light into broad pools of lustreless darkness, their tall heads level, for Patrine carried her hat of silver spangles swinging from the top of the sunshade with the lengthy stick. "Sometimes, for weeks, the days slip by smoothly as the beads of a Rosary over a baby's finger. Then—bang-bang-bang! they explode—like a rocket fired by a signal-pistol—until things fizzle out into dulness again."
"It's true!" Her bosom rose in a sigh. "But it's possible to get awfully fed up with banging and fizzling. One can learn to long—just for a little dulness, as long as it means quiet and rest, and peace of mind."
That Patrine should voice such an aspiration was incredible even to the speaker. "How changed I must be!" she said to herself, as Sherbrand answered her:
"With heathery moors and towering scaurs, and galloping trout-rivers brabbling over lichened boulders—and Somebody one loves to talk to—one calls that kind of dulness a happy honeymoon!"
She thrilled as his hand, swinging freely by his hip, touched hers, lightly, enclosed, and then released it. He was no tardy lover, this Flying Man. He knew a thousand times better than von Herrnung how a girl should be courted and wooed. For, with her heart in joyful tumult, and her usually pale cheeks warmed and rosy with shy blushes, it was a girl who walked beside Alan Sherbrand that night. I am sorry she could forget so easily the slip that had led her over the frontier line, the Rubicon that can never be recrossed. But in fact she did forget, just as a young man would have forgotten. Though she was to remember as only a woman can remember, and to suffer as only a woman can.
In the midst of the new, wonderful happiness, so strangely threaded not only for Patrine, with bitter loss and tragic possibilities, she suffered a quite intolerable twinge of memory in the sudden recollection of the boldly-scrutinising look cast upon her by the bearded man in the white Naval uniform. She did not realise that an imperious gesture of the brown hand, whose wrist had sported a massive gold watch-bracelet, had whisked von Herrnung off the scene. But she guessed that the huge red-haired Prussian, bowing at the side of the big blue F.I.A.T., had clicked his heels before a master who could break him at his will.
He had boasted.... They knew! Not only the bearded man whose look had stung so, but the close-shaven old Colossus with the tortoiseshell-mounted pince-nez on his thick heavy nose and the huge wart on his yellow cheek. And the sallow diplomat in the Homburg hat shadowing the sly glance and the moustache tucked up by a sinister smile under his drooping Oriental nose. They all knew.... Even the servant had worn the leer that is born of knowledge, as he said in his Teutonic gutturals:
"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her here..."
Horrible! But she would not remember. She banished the hateful, knowing faces with a gallant effort and turned to Sherbrand, asking whether he had been an Eton, or Rugby, or Harrow boy?
For had her Flying Man borne the cachet of the Public School Patrine Saxham would have infinitely preferred it. That it is possible to be a snob even in the most tragic or romantic moment of one's existence, she had not realised before she discovered herself to herself in this way.