“Yes.”
“Then I felt free. I felt I’d won. I felt you were right and I should never be troubled again. I’m happy now... Of course, I was happy before, but, when he flung himself into the carriage at Euston... Eric, you’ll despise me, but have you ever seen a dog being called simply to be beaten? It comes. It knows it’s going to be beaten. And it might run away. But it knows it has to come back later. I felt that, if ever Johnnie... I felt it at lunch, when he suggested that I should come on the river with him...”
The stream was carrying them two yards down for every yard that Eric paddled towards home. He bent over the side for a merciful moment of eclipse and unshipped a pole.
“And now?,” he asked.
“When he said we should be late for tea, if we didn’t get back, I knew I’d won,” she answered promptly.
A serpentine rivulet of water ran down Eric’s arm; he turned his head and industriously rolled up his sleeve.
“Good for that,” he commented. “Ivy, if you ever think I’m behaving like a cold-blooded old man, I should rather like you to suspend judgement for five seconds. Think of me as a man who might have kidnapped you, when you were so miserable that you didn’t know whether you were on your head or on your heels; think that I’m trying to play fair when perhaps I might play foul and still win... I’ve forgotten what I was going to say, but, if we don’t get back, we shall be late for dinner.”
She looked at him fearlessly; and he realized that she had not looked at him like that before.
“I can think of you as all that—and a lot more,” she answered.
For the second dinner Eric found himself between Lady Maitland and Amy Loring; he observed that Ivy was between O’Rane and Gaymer, but he felt no uneasiness. She had emerged morally stronger and with enhanced personality from her encounter of the afternoon. Gaymer shewed no sign of disappointment or rebuff, but he was silent and preoccupied. Eric would have given much to know what was going on inside his head and what he made of a girl who yielded to him and then refused to marry him....