She sprang up from her rock and faced about; but Lenox, smilingly, determined, stood astride across the narrow path.
‘Excuse me, Miss O’Neill, not if I can prevent it,’ he said. ‘Forsyth’s going to have his chance fair and square. Of course if you’re game for a free fight—well, come on!’
For a second she looked him up and down, a sudden flicker of humour in her eyes. ‘I tackled a policeman once. A bigger fellow than you. And he was very glad to get rid of me.’
‘I can well believe it,’ Maurice answered with becoming gravity. ‘But look here, just consider, what earthly good would you do by deferring the inevitable—say, twenty-four hours—and probably annoying Miss Alison into the bargain?’
The last shot told. Harry let out her breath in a great sigh. ‘Life’s a bewildering business,’ she mused aloud. But common sense told her he spoke truth; and she liked him none the less for backing up his friend. ‘Very well, Mr. Lenox, I give it up. You evidently have instructions from head-quarters, and I’ll stay here till you give the word. But scenery bores me stiff; so please make yourself as interesting as you know how.’
‘Right you are,’ said Maurice; and indicating her deserted rock he flung himself on the heather at her feet in such a position that her prosaic figure in its knitted coat and rough skirt should not intrude upon his vision of the landscape. Then he proceeded, in his fluent fashion, to enlarge on the subject uppermost in his mind—Sir Mark’s queer conviction that a wide-spread revival of handicrafts and guilds would go far to solve the strike problem by restoring the creative sense in labour and renewing the broken link between art and life⸺
For Sir Mark himself, at that moment, life held only one purpose, one achievement worthy of serious consideration—the linking of his own destiny with that of the girl who seemed capable of maintaining indefinitely her graceful pose of contemplation. It was a pose that revealed to admirable advantage the long lines of her figure and the beauty of her small head with its close-fitting coils of hair. Her discarded hat lay on the heather at her feet. Close to her chosen rock sprang a young birch, its supple grace a reflection of her own; its drooping plumes, stirred by the breeze, dappling her blue dress with tiny restless shadows.
Was it some day-dream that so held her, Mark wondered, or pure consideration for the trout that he had presumably come out to catch? Either way, her silence and abstraction had the effect of so intensifying his own emotion that speech seemed desecration. Besides—he had spoken already. Could there really be any need to tell her again how swiftly and strangely she had swept him from his moorings, so that life held nothing, momentarily, but his glorified vision of herself? Last night the sound of her voice, echoing his own confession, had silenced, for good, the whispers of prudence that strove to curb his impetuous spirit, counselling delay. If only that confounded Miss O’Neill had given him a chance while the glamour was on them both, the whole thing might have seemed less egregiously precipitate. Now that he had schemed for half an hour’s privacy; now that she sat there, only a few yards away, seemingly unaware of his existence, a shiver of uncertainty chilled him. A fortnight ago to-day, while he and Maurice were rambling in search of subjects, he had beheld her for the first time. For him that fortnight was an indefinable age. For her it might simply be fourteen days⸺
But this sort of havering would never do. He was a strong man, not unschooled in suffering, but little used to be thwarted in his desire. And he did not seriously expect to be thwarted now. Deliberately he laid aside his fishing tackle, and leaning on one elbow looked up at the girl, whose rock was set a little higher along the sloping bank of the stream. For a few seconds he took his fill of her, from the coronet of her hair to the seductive curves of her mouth and chin that made such tender atonement for the cool directness of her eyes.
Still she did not move; but her lips parted in a small sigh, and the spell was broken. Mark rose and planted himself before her.