“It's the salt air, my boy,” commented the young man, gravely refilling his own glass as though accepting the excuse on his own account.
Then man and beast completed ablutions and grooming and filed out through the wide corridor, around the gallery, and down the broad stairway to the gun-room—an oaken vaulted place illuminated by the sun, where mellow lights sparkled on glass-cased rows of fowling pieces and rifles, on the polished antlers of shaggy moose heads.
Miss Landis sat curled up in a cushioned corner under the open casement panes, offering herself a cup of tea. She looked up, nodding invitation; he found a place beside her. A servant whispered, “Scotch or Irish, sir,” then set the crystal paraphernalia at his elbow.
He said something about the salt air, casually; the girl gazed meditatively at space.
The sound of wheels on the gravel outside aroused her from a silence which had become a brown study; and, to Siward, presently, she said: “Here endeth our first rendezvous.”
“Then let us arrange another immediately,” he said, stirring the ice in his glass.
The girl considered him with speculative eyes: “I shouldn't exactly know what to do with you for the next hour if I didn't abandon you.”
“Why bother to do anything with me? Why even give yourself the trouble of deserting me? That solves the problem.”
“I really don't mean that you are a problem to me, Mr. Siward,” she said, amused; “I mean that I am going to drive again.”
“I see.”