“Surely it is simple enough,” he said. “I have acquiesced in limitations. May is devoted to me--as much devoted to me as I am to her, I think. But don’t you see there is less of me than there might have been. There is less of me to love and to be loved--God knows, it is all perfect enough in its own scale. But there might have been another scale. And now”--he dropped his hands and sat upright, looking at Manvers--“and now we are measured by yards, not by metres.”
A little wind stirred suddenly in the elm trees by the bank and ruffled the surface of the water. A fish rose in mid-stream beyond the boat, and the current carried the concentric ripples down with it. Behind, the little rambling red-brick house stood sunning its southern front, and on the lawn, in the shadow of a tall copper beech, they could see the glimmer of a figure in a white dress sitting in a low basket chair. Tom turned as he spoke and looked half involuntarily at it.
“Come,” he said; “May will be waiting for us. We are going to have tea early, and then go for a row up the river. We are going to do many pleasant things.”
The boat was anchored among some flowering rushes; a few strokes of the punt pole sent it back to the bottom of the lawn. They strolled up together to where May was sitting, and she welcomed them with that brilliant smile which was so natural to her.
“Tom has been so sombre this last day or two,” she said to Manvers. “I hope you have been cheering him up.”
“I don’t think there is much the matter with him,” said Manvers. “He says he feels optimistic.”
“Manvers called me pessimistic,” remarked Tom; “but that is only a most flagrant instance of his own pessimism. He sees everything through his own spectacles.”
“What frightfully contradictory accounts,” she said. “Oh, Tom, by the way, there is a man here who has come from the station to have the carriage of the Demeter paid. It is fifteen pounds. Surely that is an awful lot. I thought I had better ask you before I paid it.”
“Yes; I bought it back from Lord Henderson. He was very nice about it. He saw I really wanted it, and he let me have it for what he had paid for it. He bought it, you know, as a piece of cultured lumber, perhaps also as a species of charity, and he has sold it for charity. It came two days ago. I told them to unpack it this morning. Where have you had it put, May?”