She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.
“I have been thinking of it,” she said, the familiar serious look coming into her eyes. “After all what have we to say to each other?”
Sam watched her steadily.
“I have a lot of things to say to you,” he announced. “That is to say—well—I have, if things are as I hope.” She got off the horse and they stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the golf player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light, his bag upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he walked, bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing over a low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the realisation was followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he actually knew of her and of her way of thought. What assurance had he that she would not laugh, jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He was afraid as he had never been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped about for a way to begin. Expressions he had caught and noted in her strong serious little face when he had achieved but a mild curiosity concerning her came back to visit his mind and he tried desperately to build an instant idea of her from these. And then turning his face from her he plunged directly into his thoughts of the past months as though she had been sharing talking to the colonel.
“I have been thinking we might marry, you and I,” he said, and cursed himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.
“You do get things done, don’t you?” she replied, smiling.
“Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?”
“Because I want to live with you,” he said; “I have been talking to the colonel.”
“About marrying me?” She seemed about to begin laughing.
He hurried on. “No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me about your ideas. I felt I had to know.”