Eve was listening, stricken, yet trying not to feel afraid.
CHAPTER XVII
LYNETTE INTERPOSES
At such a parting of the ways, Canterton’s elemental grimness showed itself. He was the peasant, sturdy, obstinate, steady-eyed, ready to push out into some untamed country, and to take and hold a new domain. For under all his opulent culture and his rare knowledge lay the patient yet fanatical soul of the peasant. He was both a mystic and a child of the soil, not a city dweller, mercurial and flippant, a dog at the heels of profit and loss.
Eve had talked of the impossible, but when he took Lynette by the hand and went down with her into the Wilderness, Canterton could not bring himself to play the cynic. Sitting in the bracken, and watching Lynette making one of her fairy fires, he felt that it was Eve’s scepticism that was impossible, and not his belief in a magnanimous future. He was so very sure of himself that he felt too sure of other people. His name was not a thing to be made the sport of rumour. Men and women had worked together before now; and did the world quarrel with a business man because he kept a secretary or a typist? Moreover, he believed himself to be different from the average business man, and what might have meant lust for one spoke of a sacrament to the other.
“Daddy, why didn’t Miss Eve come yesterday?”
“She had work at home, Princess.”
“And to-day too?”
“It seems so.”