“One week more!”
Eric was startled:
“I didn’t say anything!”
“I know you didn’t. I was just thinking—”
“I was thinking, too—of that. Well, Ivy?”
“Bless you, Eric!... As if I didn’t know all along! As if there’d ever been the faintest shadow of a doubt. But I shan’t marry you unless you swear to me that you want me. I feel I shall disappoint you so terribly, Eric; you’re so clever and so wise. I never think... You were quite right about Johnnie; I feel much better now that it’s all over.”
He helped her into the boat and paddled into mid-stream.
“It went off all right?,” he asked. “I don’t want to know what happened.”
“But I want to tell you, I like telling you everything.” She thought critically over her story before beginning it. “It was curious. He seemed to start again as though nothing had happened...” She was looking dreamily at the nodding blue and orange irises wading a third of the way across the stream; she did not see Eric’s involuntary shudder and stiffening. “He began again from the time when I asked him when we were going to be married; he actually said, ‘You remember that talk we had one night before I took you to the Vaudeville. You asked me how long I thought I should take to get demobilized...’ I said ‘Yes’. Eric.., well, I’ll come to that later. He said he’d had a very bothering time, because sometimes, when he’s not well, he doesn’t seem able to make up his mind about anything; and no one in his wretched ministry seemed to know what anybody wanted to do... He’d thought it over and he’d decided to come out. You know his uncle, Lord Poynter, don’t you? Well, Lord Poynter had offered him a job—a very good job, I imagine—in the Azores Line....”
She paused and regarded the irises with a puzzled frown, still trying to examine her narrative critically.