Mr. Wilson burst into sudden boisterous laughter. "A good joke that. Come along! We all have a thirst for knowledge on us this morning."
Lady Maud, left alone with the two carven images, took up the sea-waif and carried it off to her own sanctum, where she stuck it in the place of honour on the mantelshelf. Then, walking to the window, she looked out on pale green jostling waves and purple-green swaying heather.
"I wonder when Louisa will turn up," she thought irrelevantly. "After all, she would have done better to come on with us and get it over, instead of waiting in the yacht for calmer weather. Suppose it were never to calm down?"
She threw open the window with a reckless laugh. The fresh wind raced in, bellying the curtains like sails, catching her slender figure with such force that she was fain to cling to the sash as to a mast. So standing, with that background of surging sea, and one hand keeping her hair from her eyes, she looked as if she were adrift and searching the horizon for some familiar landmark.
"Here's luck, and wissing you may all go back as you came, without any mistakes whatever."
It was the spokesman ghillie from below, toasting the new tenant. She looked down to meet Eustace Gordon's amused eyes raised to hers; she smiled back at him, and, closing the window, returned to the fireplace. There, under the eye of fate personified in the war paddle, the phrase "go back as you came" struck her as a curious wish, perhaps even a somewhat infelicitous one, considering the discomfort of their arrival. Whereat she laughed, as she did at most things. Not all, for Lady Maud, despite many attempts, had never been able to get the whip hand of her conscience. She had to _ménager_ it by driving round anything at which she thought it likely to shy. Her marriage to Mr. Wilson had been approached in this circuitous way until its manifest advantages completely obscured the central fact that she really loved her cousin Eustace. As yet repentance had not come to her; indeed, it came hardly to one so full of common sense and worldly wisdom as she was, but it came sometimes. Once as a child it had come suddenly in the sunlit solitary room into which she had been set apart for reflection, and she had knelt down to say naïvely, "Oh, God, I'm sorry now; but please don't make me sorry again, for I don't like it."