“All alone?”
“Buzz,” she said, with a downcast smile.
“Buzz is such an effective protection that I’m inclined to ask you to share him.” His voice was even more tentative than his words. He fancied he would have made a tremendous advance if she allowed him to come with her.
“Oh, yes,” she said foolishly, “you may have half.”
“Thank you. I am three miles from my club, twenty-four hours from my office, and four thousand feet above sea-level—and I don’t mind confessing that I’m very frightened indeed. How long, I wonder, does it take to acquire the magnificent indifference to the elements which you display? But the storm is indubitably coming: don’t you think we had better turn back?”
“Yes,” she said again, and they turned back; but they sauntered along among the clouds at precisely the pace they might have taken in the meadows of the world below.
She asked him where he had spent his leave and how he had enjoyed it, and she gathered from his replies that one might stay too long in India to find even Italy wholly paradisaical, although Monte Carlo had always its same old charm. “You should see Monte Carlo before some cataclysm overtakes it,” he said. “You would find it amusing. I spent a month at Homburg,” he went on humorously, “with what I consider the greatest possible advantage to my figure. Though my native friends have been openly condoling with me on my consequent loss of prestige, and I have no doubt my sylph-like condition will undermine my respectability.” He felt, as he spoke, deplorably middle-aged, and to mention these things seemed to be a kind of apology for them.
Rhoda looked at him with the conviction that he had left quite ten years in Europe, but she found herself oddly reluctant to say so. “Mummie will tell you,” she said. “Mummie always discovers the most wonderful changes in people when they have been home. And why did you come back so soon?”
“Why?” he repeated, half facing round, and then suddenly dropping back again. “I came to see about something.”
“Oh, yes, of course you did. I know about it. And do you think you will win?”