"Isn't there any place in the village I could go to?" I asked.
He shook his head. "There's one pub--a sort of beerhouse--but they don't take people in," he said.
"The Jervaises don't encourage that sort of thing," he replied. "Afraid of the place getting frippery. I've heard them talking about it in the car. And as they own every blessed cottage in the place...." He left the deduction to my imagination, and continued with the least touch of bashfulness, "You wouldn't care to come to us, I suppose?"
"To the Home Farm?" I replied stupidly. I was absurdly embarrassed. If I had not chanced to see that grouping in the wood before lunch, I should have jumped at the offer. But I knew that it must have been Miss Banks who had seen me--spying. Jervaise had had his back to me. And she would probably, I thought, take his view of the confounded accident. She would be as anxious to avoid me as I was to avoid her. Coming so unexpectedly, this invitation to the Farm appeared to me as a perfectly impossible suggestion.
Banks, naturally, misinterpreted my embarrassment.
"I suppose it would put you in the wrong, as it were--up at the Hall," he said. "Coming to us after that row, I mean, 'd look as if what they'd been saying was all true."
"I don't care a hang about _that_," I said earnestly. In my relief at being able to speak candidly I forgot that I was committing myself to an explanation; and Banks inevitably wandered into still more shameful misconceptions of my implied refusal.
"Oh! my dear chap," I interposed quickly. "Do believe me, I'd far sooner stay at the Home Farm than at Jervaise Hall."
He looked at me with rather a blank stare of inquiry.
For a second or two we stared at one another like antagonists searching for an unexposed weakness. He was the first to try another opening.
"Fact is, I suppose," he said tentatively, "that you'd like to be out of this affair altogether? Had enough of it, no doubt?"
I might have accepted that suggestion without hurting Banks's self-respect. I saw the excuse as a possibility that provided an honourable way of escape. I had but to say, "Well, in a way, yes. I have, in all innocence, got most confoundedly entangled in an affair that hasn't anything whatever to do with me, and it seems that the best thing I can do now is to clear out." He would have believed that. He would have seen the justice of it. But the moment this easy way of escape was made clear to me, I knew that I did not want to take it; that in spite of everything, I wanted, almost passionately, to go to the Home Farm.