It was a remark of old Major Carrington that incited this adventure.
“It is some distance through the wood--is she quite safe?”
It was a mere reflection as he went out. It was very late. I do not know
how the dinner, or rather the after-hours of it, had lengthened. It must
have been the incomparable charm of the woman. She had come, this night,
luminously, it seemed to us, through the haze that had been on her--the
smoke haze of a strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been
carried along in it with no sense of time; my sister, the ancient Major
Carrington and I.
He turned back in the road, his decayed voice whipped by the stimulus of
her into a higher note.
“Suppose the village coachman should think her as lovely as we
do--what!”
He laughed and turned heavily up the road a hundred yards or so to his
cottage set in the pine wood. I stood in the road watching the wheels
of the absurd village vehicle, the yellow cut-under, disappear. The old
Major called back to me; his voice seemed detached, eerie with the thin
laugh in it.
“I thought him a particularly villainous-looking creature!”
It was an absurd remark. The man was one of the natives of the island,
and besides, the innkeeper was a person of sound sense; he would know
precisely about his driver.