That faintly defiant jerk of his head. What did it defy? That vaguely puzzled look, as if he tried to grasp at a word whose syllables danced in the recesses of his brain, or struggled to locate some indistinct smell. What was eluding him?
My thoughts were interrupted by the swish of the newspaper falling from his fingers. My eye caught the headlines of the open page as it fluttered to the ground. They dealt with the bellicose caperings of Monsieur Poincaré and with the latest murder trial that was quickening the pulses of the great British public. I glanced up at Archie's grey face. It was no longer puzzled. He had found the word he sought.
And when he had gone, 'Don't you agree now,' said the red-haired girl, 'that Captain Sinclair is a tiny bit dull?'"
CHAPTER II
Within forty-eight hours, some of the questions I had asked myself on Mrs. Lavater's verandah were answered.
I had finished breakfast and with the help of my fishing fundi was putting a patch on the elder of my canoes, when I heard a voice. Even if the Sinclairs had not been on my mind, I would have recognised Norah's deep tones. I rose from my work, feeling after some passable excuse for having failed to visit their camp half a dozen miles away. My true reason had been an instinctive shrinking from other people's troubles.
But my first sight of Norah told me that forms might be forgotten. Her eyes, that the lamp of romance had once lit, now were dark with pain. Was it possible, you wondered, that they had ever laughed? Had even cried? Without suffering the decay of age, she had lost her youth. The wing of death, you guessed, was between her and the sun. Infinitely remote from her seemed the life that the rains set pulsing through each leaf, each blade of grass. She noticed nothing of the beauty that surrounded her, the shouts of green that the trees set up, the blue eye of the lake looking along the glade my carriers had cut. Her eyes were turned inwards on some private hell whose key lay in her bosom.
Her first words were banal enough. Some apology for intrusion that I waved away. My reply, inevitably trivial, sounded flippant in the face of her manifest grief and I subsided into an awkward silence.
Archie was ill, went on the low voice, and their quinine was finished: she had wondered...