There it was in the park that for the first time I pitted myself against life upon a definite issue, and prepared my first experience of defeat. "I _will_ have her," I said, hammering at the turf with my fist. "I will. I do not care if I give all my life...."
Then I lay still and bit the sweetness out of joints of grass, and presently thought and planned.
For three or four days I could get no word with Mary. I could not now come and go as I had been able to do in the days when we were still "the children." I could not work, I could not rest, I prowled as near as I could to Burnmore House hoping for some glimpse of her, waiting for the moment when I could decently present myself again at the house.
When at last I called, Justin had gone and things had some flavor of the ancient time. Lady Ladislaw received me with an airy intimacy, all the careful responsibility of her luncheon party manner thrown aside. "And how goes Cambridge?" she sang, sailing through the great saloon towards me, and I thought that for the occasion Cambridge instead of Oxford would serve sufficiently well. "You'll find them all at tennis," said Lady Ladislaw, and waved me on to the gardens. There I found all four of them and had to wait until their set was finished.
"Mary," I said at the first chance, "are we never to talk again?"
"I am dying to talk to you--as we used to talk."
"Next time I come," I said, "I shall bring you a letter. There is so much----"
"No," she said. "Can't you get up in the morning? Very early--five or six. No one is up until ever so late."
"Serve!" said Maxton, who was playing the two of us and had stopped I think to tighten a shoe.
Things conspired against any more intimacy for a time. But we got our moment on the way to tea. She glanced back at Philip, who was loosening the net, and then forward to estimate the distance of Maxton and Guy. "They're all three going," she said, "after Tuesday. Then--before six."
"Suppose after all," she threw out, "I can't come."
"If I can't come one morning I may come another," she spoke hastily, and I perceived that Guy and Maxton had turned and were waiting for us.
"Yes. On the further side. Don't come by the road, come across by the end of the mere. Lie in the bracken until you see me coming.... I've not played tennis a dozen times this year. Not half a dozen."