body kept out of my way. I got at what it was at last through Bob. Mother and the relatives and the Bishop and Mrs. Lorrimer had had solemn conferences about the advisability of marrying us at once on our return, Bob eighteen, and me fifteen. But dad damned them up hill and down dale and shut them up somehow. But Bob got the worst of that, and he ran away from home for years, went to the South and to Australia. And it was what they thought about Bob and me that just finished the whole bunch for me. . . . There, I said it was a long story. I do hope I haven’t bored you.”
Her manner changed suddenly.
“You have not,” he said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “It’s a proper story, and explains a lot.” He was as much interested, indeed more so, in the way she had told it than in the tale itself.
She wanted to ask him questions about himself. She felt hot and very alive, for she had got herself quite worked up. And after her long talk the silence seemed abrupt and likely to become significant. He looked very boyish sitting still with his hands clasped now round his knees, and his face turned so that she could see his profile clearly against the trunk of the tree. He sensed her intensity and wondered if it was just her own dramatic sense that had so wound her up.
“Yes, you have had goblins too,” he said, quietly turning his face to her. “I think it was pretty fine that you could stand against all that.”
“I rather liked standing a lot of it,” she said honestly.
She felt the smile that played about his eyes. And then he stood up, cutting off whatever mood they might have drifted into.
“Come on, let’s ride again.”
She was not accustomed to following the moods of men.
