Hannah thought nothing of her absence at the mid-day meal. f.a.n.n.y thought a great deal, but said no word. Jane, thinking little, casually questioned why it was always married men who came to Bridnorth.

"And invariably married men who play golf," she added. Indeed in those days the younger men somewhat left the game to their elders. "I believe Mary's a bit of a fool," she went on. "If she really wanted to marry, she'd play tennis or sit on the beach at bathing time. That girl Hyland got married last year throwing pebbles at an old bottle. We've all thought marriage was a serious business. That was the way they brought us up." She looked at her mother's portrait. "That's what's been all wrong with us. It isn't the one who sits quietest who's chosen. It's the one who fusses about and chooses for herself. You've got to be able to throw pebbles at gla.s.s bottles now. Crochet hooks aren't any good.

All our chances have been lost in two purl and one plain. It's their fault, both of them--it's their fault."

Jane spoke so terribly near the truth sometimes that it was agony for those others to listen to her. To Hannah it was sacrilege almost, against the spirit of those still ruling in that house. To f.a.n.n.y it was no sacrilege. She too knew it had been their fault. But the truth of it was a whip, driving her, not that she forgot her fatigue, but so as to urge her on, stumbling, feeling the hope in her heart like harness wearing into the flesh.

Almost visibly she aged as she listened. Her expression drooped. Her eyes fixed in a steady gaze upon Jane's face while she was speaking as though the weight of lead were holding them from movement.

"Don't speak like that, Jane!" Hannah exclaimed. "How can you say it's their fault? They did the very best they knew for us. Wouldn't you sooner be as you are than like that girl Hyland?"

"She's got a baby now," Jane replied imperturbably. "She'll steady down.

She's contributed more than we have. It isn't much when all you can say is that you've given a few old clothes to jumble sales."

"I know what Jane means," said f.a.n.n.y. Her memory had caught her back to that late evening on the cliffs when she felt again, like an internal wound, that spareness of her body in the arms which for those few moments had held her close. "I know what Jane means," she repeated, and rose from the table, leaving the room, not waiting for her coffee.

At the Golf Club over their boiled eggs and the gritty coffee while Liddiard smoked, they talked of Wenlock Hall, the history of it, the farm and lands surrounding it, the meaning that it had for him.

"How many children have you?" asked Mary.

"None," said he.

It was a question as to whether they should play the final match that afternoon. Each had won a game.

"Why get through good things all at once?" said he. "That's a sky for sketching--my sort of amiable sketching. The view across the bay from that Penlock hill will be wonderful."

Her readiness to part with his company for the afternoon was simple and genuine.

"Of course," she said, "you're here for a holiday. I was getting selfish. I don't often get a good game, you see. We've plenty of opportunity if, as you say, you don't go till next week."

"Oh, I meant you to come if you would," he explained quickly. "Not much fun, I know. But there's the walk out there and back and I like being talked to while I'm painting. Not much of a conversationalist then, I admit. I'm doing all the selfishness--but one doesn't often get the chance of being talked to--as you talk."

It was the first time she had ever been told that any power of interesting conversation was hers. She felt a catch of excitement in her breath. When she answered him, she could not quite summon her voice to speak on a casual note. It sounded m.u.f.fled and thick, as though her heart were beating in her throat and she had to speak through it. Yet she was not conscious that it was.

"I'll come if you really want me to," she said, and her acceptance was neither eager nor restrained. She went as freely as she walked and she walked with a loose, swinging stride. It became a mental observation with him as they climbed the cliff path, that their steps fell together with even regularity.

His sketch was a failure. The atmosphere defied him, or the talk they made distracted his mind. He threw the block face downwards on the gra.s.s.

"Oh! why do you do that?" she asked, regretting consciously that which she did not know she was glad of--"It looked as if it were going to be so nice."

"It had got out of hand," said he. "They do, so often. I know when I can't pull 'em together. Besides, talking's better, isn't it? You can't give your whole interest to two things at once."

How long had they known each other? Two days--less! He felt he had been talking to her constantly, over a long period of time. She knew he felt that and was kept in wonder as to what her interest could be to him.

Once definitely having put his sketch out of his mind, he lay back on the close, sharp-bitten gra.s.s, looking no more across the bay, but talking to Mary about herself. Tentative and restrained as his questions were, they sought her out. She felt no desire for concealment, but sat there, upright, as one would most times find her, drawing a thread of sea gra.s.s backwards and forwards through her fingers, answering the questions he asked, sometimes briefly, sometimes with far excursion into her mind, expressing thoughts she scarcely had been conscious of till then.

"You make me a great egotist," she said presently, with a laugh.

"Isn't yours the age for egotism?" he answered. "Why shouldn't you think about yourself when you're young, and all's in front of you? When you come up with it you'll have no time."

"When I'm young," she laughed. "You'd better guess how old I am," and she laughed again, knowing what Hannah or Jane would think to hear her.

"I don't want to guess," said he. "Suppose you were twenty-eight--or even thirty, I say all's in front of you. That's your age. That's the impression you give me."

"I'm twenty-nine," said she, and her eyebrow lifted with suppressed laughter as he sat up in his surprise to look at her.

"Twenty-nine?" he repeated. "What have you been doing with your life?

Why are you here, playing an occasional game of golf, attending mothers'

meetings, going to your little church every Sunday to listen to that fool of a parson you have? It's waste--waste--utter waste!"

"Have you ever thought how many women do waste in the world?" she asked and then of a sudden felt the hot sweep of blood into her face. How had it happened she had come to talk to a man and a stranger like this? Yet wasn't it true, and wasn't there some sort of exciting satisfaction in saying it? She could not have said that to Hannah, to Jane, not even to f.a.n.n.y. Why was it possible to exchange such intimate thoughts with a man and he, an utter stranger she had met only the day before?

Suddenly, in the speaking of that thought, she had learnt something about herself and not herself only but about all women and the whole of life. All that her mother had taught her was wrong. Concealment, deception, fraud, these were not the outward symbols of modesty. Just as for the ailments of her body she could not have gone to a woman doctor, so with the smoldering fever of her inmost thoughts, it was only to a man she could speak.

Then did men understand? With the rest of her s.e.x she had always argued that they did not. If it was not for understanding, then why had she spoken? It must be that they understood; but not with their minds, not cruelly, scorchingly, calculatingly, as women did, judging shrewdly the relation between character and the fact confided, but more spiritually than this; the inner meaning, the deeper purpose, relating that confidence to the soul of the woman who made it, rather than to her conduct.

In that moment she had learnt the indefinable complement between the s.e.xes. In that moment, Mary Throgmorton had for the first time in her life answered to the cry of Nature calling mate to mate.

The heat of the blood lifted in temperature in her cheeks as she came upon her knowledge, but he said nothing of the flush that lingered in them. A woman would have noticed that and to her shrewd observation they would have burnt the more. As he sat there, not looking at her, but staring through the pine trees across the bay, she found a feeling of comfort in being with him as her cheeks grew cool again.

Never looking at her, he asked if women were conscious of that sense of waste, and the tone of his voice was neither searching nor inquisitive.

It had no suggestion of personal curiosity behind it. He spoke from inside himself, from inner purposes and from the inner purposes within herself she answered him, feeling no sense of restraint.

"Do you imagine they wouldn't be?" she replied. "Not perhaps in their everyday life, but in moments in those days when even in a crowd you suddenly drop out of existence, like a star falling, and find yourself alone. Of course they feel it. Every energy of man it seems to me has been to keep women from the touch of life. But sometimes they find a loophole and get out and find the sense of it, if it's only in the tips of their fingers. They may be only moments, but every woman has them."

She had never talked like this to any one before. Had there been any one to talk to? Would she have spoken to them in such a fashion if there had? It was only since that sermon, the Christmas before, she had been aware such thoughts were in the composition of her mind and never had they expressed themselves so definitely as this.

Yet her wonder was more of him than of herself. Until that moment she could never have believed a man could have understood. And it was not from what he said that she felt he did. He was sitting up now and he was nursing his knees as he gazed out across the bay towards Kingsnorth.

It was in the abstract penetration of his gaze, the silence about him as he listened that she sensed his understanding.

Yet had she known it, he was thinking more of himself than of her.

Something echoed in him with all she had said. It was not that he had never gained, but that he had lost his touch with life. The spirit in him was wandering and alone and it had chanced upon hers, wandering also.

This sense of mutual understanding was merely the call of Nature. The hazard of all things had tumbled them together in the crowd of the world. Something had touched. They knew it that second day. She was answering some purpose in him--he in her. And the explanation that Nature vouchsafed to her was that he understood women; and the explanation that Nature vouchsafed to him was that he was beginning to understand himself, and that there was much in him that needed much in her.

It was too soon to think that. It was too upheaving.

He rose quickly to his feet, saying, half under his breath, but loud enough for her to hear, "It's odd--it's all odd."

And she knew what he meant.

IV

The bay at Bridnorth is inclosed by two headlands of sandy stone. That to the east rises irregularly with belts of pine wood and sea-bent oaks, opening later in heathered moors that stretch in broad plateaus, then sink to sheltered hollows where one farm at least lies hidden in its clump of trees.