It suited her mood, when once she had taken that direction, to walk very fast. She had an undefined sense of keeping pace with events; her vigorous steps made a rhythm for her buoyant thought, and helped it out. She was entirely occupied with the way in which she would explain to Mr. Doyle how it was that she was not married to Lewis Ancram. She anticipated a pleasure in this, and she thought it was because Doyle would be gratified, on his friend’s account. He had never liked the match—she clung to that impression in all humility—he would perhaps approve of her breaking it off. Rhoda felt a little excited satisfaction at the idea of being approved of by Philip Doyle. She put the words with which she would tell him into careful phrases as she walked, constructing and reconstructing them, while Buzz kept an erratic course before her with inquisitive pauses by the wayside and vain chasing of little striped squirrels that whisked about the boles of the trees. Buzz, she thought, had never been more idiotically amusing.
The road grew boskier and lonelier. Miss Daye met a missionary lady in a jinricksha, and then a couple of schoolboys sprinting, and then for a quarter of a mile nobody at all. The little white houses stopped cropping out on ledges above her head, the wall of rock or of rubble rose solidly up, wet and glistening, and tapestried thick with tiny ferns and wild begonias. All at once, looking over the brink, she saw that the tin roofs of the cottages down the khud-side no longer shone in the sun; the clouds had rolled between it and them—very likely down there it was raining. Presently the white mist smoked up level with the road, and she and the trees and the upper mountain stood in dappled sunlight for a moment alone above a phantasmally submerged world. Then the crisp leaf-shadows on the road grew indistinct and faded, the sunlight paled and went out, and in a moment there was nothing near or far but a wandering greyness, and here and there perhaps the shadowed hole of an oak-tree or the fantastic outline of a solitary nodding fern.
“It’s going to rain, Buzz,” she said, as the little dog mutely inquired for encouragement and direction, “and neither of us have got an umbrella. So we’ll both get wet and take our death of cold. Sumja,[[E]] Buzz?”
[E]. “Do you understand?”
As she spoke they passed the blurred figure of a man, walking rapidly in the other direction. “Buzz!” Rhoda cried, as the dog turned and trotted briskly after: “Come back, sir!” Buzz took no notice whatever, and immediately she heard him addressed in a voice which made a sudden requirement upon her self-control. She had a divided impulse—to betake herself on as fast as she could into remote indistinguishability, and to call the dog again. With a little effort of hardihood she turned and called him, turned with a thumping heart, and waited for his restoration and for anything else that might happen. The mist drifted up for a moment as Philip Doyle heard her and came quickly back; and when they shook hands they stood in a little white temple with uncertain walls and a ceiling decoration of tree-ferns in high relief.
She asked him when he had come, although she knew that already, and he inquired for her mother, although he was quite informed as to Mrs. Daye’s well-being. He explained Buzz’s remembering him, as if he had taken an unfair advantage of it, and they announced simultaneously that it was going to rain. Then conversation seemed to fail them wholly, and Rhoda made a movement of departure.
“I suppose you are going to some friend in the neighbourhood,” he said, lifting his hat, “if there is any neighbourhood—which one is inclined to doubt.”
“Oh, no, I’m only walking.”