“If you hope so, you will.”
He nodded, unconvinced, watching a flock of sand-pipers whirling into the cove like a gray snow-squall and fearlessly settling on the beach.
After a while, with a long breath: “Then it is settled,” she concluded.
If she expected corroboration from him she received none; and perhaps she was not awaiting it. She sat very still, her eyes lost in thought.
And Mortimer, peeping down at them over the thicket above, yawned impatiently and glanced about him for the most convenient avenue of self-effacement when the time arrived.
CHAPTER VII PERSUASION
The days of the house-party at Shotover were numbered. A fresh relay of guests was to replace them on Monday, and so they were making the most of the waning week on lawn and marsh, in covert and blind, or motoring madly over the State, or riding in parties to Vermillion Light. Tennis and lawn bowls came into fashion; even water polo and squash alternated on days too raw for more rugged sport.
And during all these days Beverly Plank appeared with unflagging persistence and assiduity, until his familiar, big, round head and patient, delft-blue, Dutch eyes became a matter of course at Shotover, indoors and out.
It was not that he was either accepted, tolerated, or endured; he was simply there, and nobody took the trouble to question his all-pervading presence until everybody had become too much habituated to him to think about it at all.