'You said you had the card.'
'I have never been able to understand,' Rob answered, 'how I lost that card. But,' he added sharply, 'how do you know that I lost it?'
Mary glanced up again.
'I hate being asked questions, Mr. Angus,' she said sweetly.
'Do you remember,' Rob went on, 'saying in that book that men were not to be trusted until they reached their second childhood?'
'I don't know,' Mary replied, laughing, 'that they are to be trusted even then.'
'I should think,' said Rob, rather anxiously, 'that a woman might as well marry a man in his first childhood as in his second. Surely the golden mean – ' Rob paused. He was just twenty-seven.
'We should strike the golden mean, you think?' asked Mary demurely. 'But you see it is of such short duration.'
After that there was such a long pause that Mary could easily have gone down the ladder had she wanted to do so.
'I am glad that you and Dick are such friends,' she said at last.
'Why?' asked Rob quickly.
'Oh, well,' said Mary.
'He has been the best friend I have ever made,' Rob continued warmly, 'though he says our only point in common is a hatred of rice pudding.'
'He told me,' said Mary, 'that you write on politics in the Wire.'
'I do a little now, but I have never met any one yet who admitted that he had read my articles. Even your brother won't go so far as that.'
'I have read several of them,' said Mary.
'Have you?' Rob exclaimed, like a big boy.
'Yes,' Mary answered severely; 'but I don't agree with them. I am a Conservative, you know.'
She pursed up her mouth complacently as she spoke, and Rob fell back a step to prevent his going a step closer. He could hear Mr. Meredith's line tearing the water. The boy on the next house-boat was baling the dingey, and whistling a doleful ditty between each canful.
'There will never be such a night again,' Rob said, in a melancholy voice. Then he waited for Mary to ask why, when he would have told her, but she did not ask.
'At least, not to me,' he continued, after a pause, 'for I am not likely to be here again. But there may be many such nights to you.'
Mary was unbuttoning her gloves and then buttoning them again. There is something uncanny about a woman who has a chance to speak and does not take it.
'I am glad to hear,' said Rob, 'that my being away will make no difference to you.'
A light was running along the road to Hampton Court, and Mary watched it.
'Are you glad?' asked Rob desperately.
'You said I was,' answered Mary, without turning her head. Dick was thrumming the banjo below. Her hand touched a camp-chair, and Rob put his over it. He would have liked to stand like that and talk about things in general now.
'Mary,' said Rob.
The boy ceased to whistle. All nature in that quarter was paralysed, except the tumble of water across the river. Mary withdrew her hand, but said nothing. Rob held his breath. He had not even the excuse of having spoken impulsively, for he had been meditating saying it for weeks.
By and by the world began to move again. The boy whistled. A swallow tried another twig. A moor-hen splashed in the river. They had thought it over, and meant to let it pass.
'Are you angry with me?' Rob asked.
Mary nodded her head, but did not speak. Suddenly Rob started.
'You are crying,' he said.
'No, I'm not,' said Mary, looking up now.
There was a strange light in her face that made Rob shake. He was so near her that his hands touched her jacket. At that moment there was a sound of feet on the plank that communicated between the Tawny Owl and the island, and Dick called out —
'You people up there, are you coming once round the island before you have something to eat?'
Rob muttered a reply that Dick fortunately did not catch, but Mary answered 'Yes,' and they descended the ladder.
'You had better put a shawl over your shoulders,' said Rob, in rather a lordly tone.
'No,' Mary answered, thrusting away the shawl he produced from the saloon; 'a wrap on a night like this would be absurd.'
Something caught in her throat at that moment, and she coughed. Rob looked at her anxiously.
'You had better,' he said, putting the shawl over her shoulders.
'No,' said Mary, flinging it off.
'Yes,' said Rob, putting it on again.
Mary stamped her foot.
'How dare you, Mr. Angus?' she exclaimed.
Rob's chest heaved.
'You must do as you are told,' he said.
Mary looked at him while he looked at her, but she did not take off the shawl again, and that was the great moment of Rob's life.
The others had gone on before. Although it was a white night the plank was dark in shadow, and as she stepped off it she slipped back. Rob's arm went round her for a moment. They walked round the island together behind the others, but neither uttered a word. Rob was afraid even to look at her, so he did not see that Mary looked once or twice at him.
Long after he was supposed to be in the hotel Rob was still walking round the island, with no one to see him but the cow. All the Chinese lanterns were out now, but red window-blinds shone warm in several house-boats, and a terrier barked at his footsteps. The grass was silver-tipped, as in an enchanted island, and the impatient fairies might only have been waiting till he was gone. He was wondering if she was offended. While he paced the island she might be vowing never to look at him again, but perhaps she was only thinking that he was very much improved.
At last Rob wandered to the hotel, and reaching his bedroom sat down on a chair to think it out again by candle-light. He rose and opened the window. There was a notice over the mantelpiece announcing that smoking was not allowed in the bedrooms, and having read it thoughtfully he filled his pipe. A piece of crumpled paper lay beneath the dressing-table, and he lifted it up to make a spill of it. It was part of an envelope, and it floated out of Rob's hand as he read the address in Mary Abinger's handwriting, 'Sir Clement Dowton, Island Hotel.'
CHAPTER XIV
MARY OF THE STONY HEART
A punt and a rowing-boat were racing lazily toward Sunbury on a day so bright that you might have passed women with their hair in long curls and forgiven them.
'I say, Dick,' said one of the scullers, 'are they engaged?'
Will was the speaker, and in asking the question he caught a crab. Mary, with her yellow sleeves turned up at the wrist, a great straw hat on her head, ran gaily after her pole, and the punt jerked past. If there are any plain girls let them take to punting and be beautiful.
Dick, who was paddling rather than pulling stroke, turned round on his young brother sharply.
'Whom do you mean?' he asked, speaking low, so that the other occupants of the boat should not hear him, 'Mary and Dowton?'
'No,' said Will, 'Mary and Angus. I wonder what they see in her.'
They were bound for a picnicking resort up the river; Mrs. Meredith, Mary, and Sir Clement in the punt, and the others in the boat. If Rob was engaged he took it gloomily. He sat in the stern with Mr. Meredith, while Nell hid herself away beneath a many-coloured umbrella in the prow; and when he steered the boat into a gondola, he only said vacantly to its occupants, 'It is nothing at all,' as if they had run into him. Nell's father said something about not liking the appearance of the sky, and Rob looked at him earnestly for such a length of time before replying that Mr. Meredith was taken aback. At times the punt came alongside, and Mary addressed every one in the boat except Rob. The only person in the punt whom Rob never looked at was Mary. Dick watched them uneasily, and noticed that once, when Mary nearly followed her pole into the water, Rob, who seemed to be looking in the opposite direction, was the first to see what had happened. Then Dick pulled so savagely that he turned the boat round.
That morning at breakfast in his chambers Rob had no thought of spending the day on the river. He had to be at the Wire office at ten o'clock in the evening, and during the day he meant to finish one of the many articles which he still wrote for other journals that would seldom take them. The knowledge that Sir Clement Dowton had been to Molesey disquieted him, chiefly because Mary Abinger had said nothing about it. Having given himself fifty reasons for her reticence, he pushed them from him, and vowed wearily that he would go to the house-boat no more. Then Dick walked in to suggest that they might run down for an hour or two to Molesey, and Rob agreed at once. He shaped out in the train a subtle question about Sir Clement that he intended asking Mary, but on reaching the plank he saw her feeding the swans, with the baronet by her side. Rob felt like a conjurer whose trick has not worked properly. Giving himself just half a minute to reflect that it was all over, he affected the coldly courteous, and smiled in a way that was meant to be heart-rending. Mary did not mind that, but it annoyed her to see the band of his necktie slipping over his collar.