‘Look here,’ he said: ‘I’ve something to tell you. There’s no doubt about it--I’ve fallen in love.’
I think I knew, almost before he spoke, what he would say; certainly before he spoke again I knew what was coming.
‘Yes, Margery,’ he went on: ‘my God! I have fallen in love.’
He turned his brown eyes suddenly from the hot reeling landscape in front to me.
‘Why, Jack,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter? You look queer, somehow.’
‘No--that you have fallen in love with Margery?’
‘Sure? You’ll be sure enough when you do the same. There’s no mistake about it, I can tell you. Why, Margery is the whole point of the pentathlons now.’
‘She has been so to me for the last week,’ said I.
Dick said nothing for a minute. Then, below his breath, ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘That you and I are in the same boat,’ I said.
‘How long have you known this?’ he asked.
‘No; I couldn’t. It has been too wonderful to speak of. I’m made like that. I should have told you, though, before long.’
‘Have you spoken to Margery?’ he asked. ‘No, of course you haven’t.’
‘Come away,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this place. And what are we to do?’
‘Start for Braceton at once,’ I said, ‘or the train will be in before we get there.’
‘I say, Jack,’ he said, ‘whatever happens, we’ll behave decently, won’t we?’
‘That’s all right, then. We must talk this over to-night. It must simmer a bit before we can get used to it. Don’t let us say another word about it now.’
So we rode off through the heat to Braceton, found the train already in, and Margery waiting for us on the platform, looking, for all the oppressive stagnation of the day, like some nymph of Grecian waterways. And Dick and I looked thirstily on her, but feared to meet each other’s eye, for life and love were in the balance, and we were friends.
That evening, when the others had gone to bed, we sat on in the chairs that had been taken for coolness out of the smoking-room on to the lawn. The odour of the hot summer night hung heavily, and nothing stirred in the windless air, except that from time to time a faint ghost of a tired breeze whispered from the bed of tobacco-plant, and brought with it a waft of the thick scent.
The sky had grown overcast, and from a bank of cloud which rose slowly in the west the fires of lightning flickered, and a drone of distant thunder answered. In the rooms downstairs the lights were already put out, but the bedrooms above showed illuminated squares of blind. Nearly opposite us was Margery’s room, and now and then her shadow crossed it. Then that light was put out, and presently afterwards we heard the scream of the blind updrawn, and at the open window through the darkness her white figure glimmered dimly.