“Not any harm, of course,” Elfride replied, “except such as this: ‘How happy those two are! she is proud enough now.’ What makes it worse,” she continued in the extremity of confidence, “I heard those two cricketing men say just now, ‘She’s the nobbiest girl on the boat.’ But I don’t mind it, you know, Harry.”
“I should hardly have supposed you did, even if you had not told me,” said Knight with great blandness.
She was never tired of asking her lover questions and admiring his answers, good, bad, or indifferent as they might be. The evening grew dark and night came on, and lights shone upon them from the horizon and from the sky.
“Now look there ahead of us, at that halo in the air, of silvery brightness. Watch it, and you will see what it comes to.”
She watched for a few minutes, when two white lights emerged from the side of a hill, and showed themselves to be the origin of the halo.
“What a dazzling brilliance! What do they mark?”
“The South Foreland: they were previously covered by the cliff.”
“What is that level line of little sparkles—a town, I suppose?”
“That’s Dover.”
All this time, and later, soft sheet lightning expanded from a cloud in their path, enkindling their faces as they paced up and down, shining over the water, and, for a moment, showing the horizon as a keen line.