"Bawne! ..."
She shaped the name dumbly, with lips that were pale as poplar leaves. "God forgive me!" her conscience whispered. "How little I have thought of Bawne!"
"Yes. I mean Bawne!"
So odd was the contrast between the speaker's grim, set face and the bald simplicity of his language, that her white lips twitched with a crazy desire to laugh, as he added:
"I've been keen for a long time on coming across the man who pinched my hawk-hoverer and kidnapped my friend's son—and putting the fear of God into him with an automatic revolver, or a Maxim.... But now that I know—this!"—the deadly contempt in the voice is inconveyable—"a clean death hardly meets his case. Good cartridges seem wasted in killing that fellow. One wants to set one's heel down—hard on him—and scrunch!"
He had sat silent, staring before him yet a moment longer. Then he gathered himself together and got up from the grass, glanced at his wrist-watch and said, holding out his hand to assist her in rising:
"Well, let's be going. It's half-past three. They'll expect us to tea at the cottage. By the way, you haven't told me. Did you send on your bag from the station when you came?"
She shuddered violently, and leaped up without touching the offered hand. The west was all dappled with tiny pearly cloudlets, their shadows were lengthening momentarily, the salt smell of the sea was on the breeze that came in languid puffs. But the wine of joy that had brimmed their green bowl had been emptied out by her own hand, and the draught now held to her flinching mouth was bitterer than hemlock and blacker than Styx. That change in his face and voice—
"What do you suppose? I brought no bag. I am going home by the next train." She glanced at a little jewelled wrist-watch he had given her and back at the mask-like face, that said:
"You mean we part here, for good! Is that it?"