“Don’t you think we might sit down for a little?”
“As you will,” said Alexis, seating himself on his hummock.
She cast herself down on the slope and closed her eyes for a moment.
“You did that on purpose,” she said at last. “You don’t suppose I believe the story of the broken steering-rod?”
He smiled with some bitterness. Fate was for ever against him. The moment they met in this extravagant way, there started up the barrier of a lie.
“I couldn’t very well scare those young folks with a confession of attempted suicide, could I? After all, the naked truth may at times be positively indecent.”
“Then you intended to do it?”
“Oh, yes,” said he. “But it ended, like every other Great Adventure I’ve attempted in my life, in burlesque. I assure you, that when I found myself pitched into this clump of gorse and able to pick myself up with nothing worse than a gasping for breath, I—well—the humiliation of it!—I cursed the day I was born.”
“Why did you do it?” she asked.
She had scarcely regained balance. The situation seemed unreal. But a few minutes ago he had been far from her thoughts, which were concerned with the woman to whose possibly dying bed she had been summoned, with the dreary days at Medlow now that Blaise Olifant had gone, with the still beauty of the hills and their purple sunset shadows. And now, here she was, alone with him, remote from the world, conversing as dispassionately as though he had returned from the dead—as indeed he had almost returned. At her question, he threw his chauffeur’s cap on the grass and passed his hand over his hair. The familiar gesture, the familiar nervous brown hand brought her a step nearer to reality.