Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. “I will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,” she said laughingly. “I shall see your figure against the sky.”
“And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss Swancourt,” said Stephen. “In twelve minutes from this present moment,” he added, looking at his watch, “I’ll be at the summit and look out for you.”
She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot—a mason in his working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.
To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of moving. More minutes passed—she grew cold with waiting, and shivered. It was not till the end of a quarter of an hour that they began to slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s pace.
“Rude and unmannerly!” she said to herself, colouring with pique. “Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of with——”
The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.
She returned to the porch.
“Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?” she inquired of her father.
“No,” he said surprised; “quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s master-mason, John Smith.”
“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a childish thing—looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being wounded that little hits struck her hard.