One day Hollanden said, in greeting, to Hawker, "Well, he's gone."
"Who?" asked Hawker.
"Why, Oglethorpe, of course. Who did you think I meant?"
"How did I know?" said Hawker angrily.
"Well," retorted Hollanden, "your chief interest was in his movements, I
thought."
"Why, of course not, hang you! Why should I be interested in his
movements?"
"Well, you weren't, then. Does that suit you?"
After a period of silence Hawker asked, "What did he--what made him go?"
"Who?"
"Why--Oglethorpe."
"How was I to know you meant him? Well, he went because some important
business affairs in New York demanded it, he said; but he is coming
back again in a week. They had rather a late interview on the porch last
evening."
"Indeed," said Hawker stiffly.
"Yes, and he went away this morning looking particularly elated. Aren't
you glad?"
"I don't see how it concerns me," said Hawker, with still greater
stiffness.
In a walk to the lake that afternoon Hawker and Miss Fanhall found
themselves side by side and silent. The girl contemplated the distant
purple hills as if Hawker were not at her side and silent. Hawker
frowned at the roadway. Stanley, the setter, scouted the fields in a
genial gallop.
At last the girl turned to him. "Seems to me," she said, "seems to me
you are dreadfully quiet this afternoon."
"I am thinking about my wretched field of stubble," he answered, still
frowning.
Her parasol swung about until the girl was looking up at his inscrutable
profile. "Is it, then, so important that you haven't time to talk to
me?" she asked with an air of what might have been timidity.
A smile swept the scowl from his face. "No, indeed," he said, instantly;
"nothing is so important as that."
She seemed aggrieved then. "Hum--you didn't look so," she told him.
"Well, I didn't mean to look any other way," he said contritely. "You
know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from
trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows, and blues."
A little brook, a brawling, ruffianly little brook, swaggered from side
to side down the glade, swirling in white leaps over the great dark
rocks and shouting challenge to the hillsides. Hollanden and the
Worcester girls had halted in a place of ferns and wet moss. Their
voices could be heard quarrelling above the clamour of the stream.
Stanley, the setter, had sousled himself in a pool and then gone and
rolled in the dust of the road. He blissfully lolled there, with his
coat now resembling an old door mat.
"Don't you think Jem is a wonderfully good fellow?" said the girl to the
painter.
"Why, yes, of course," said Hawker.
"Well, he is," she retorted, suddenly defensive.
"Of course," he repeated loudly.
She said, "Well, I don't think you like him as well as I like him."
"Certainly not," said Hawker.
"You don't?" She looked at him in a kind of astonishment.
"Certainly not," said Hawker again, and very irritably. "How in the wide
world do you expect me to like him as well as you like him?"
"I don't mean as well," she explained.
"Oh!" said Hawker.
"But I mean you don't like him the way I do at all--the way I expected
you to like him. I thought men of a certain pattern always fancied their
kind of men wherever they met them, don't you know? And I was so sure
you and Jem would be friends."
"Oh!" cried Hawker. Presently he added, "But he isn't my kind of a man
at all."
"He is. Jem is one of the best fellows in the world."
Again Hawker cried "Oh!"
They paused and looked down at the brook. Stanley sprawled panting in
the dust and watched them. Hawker leaned against a hemlock. He sighed
and frowned, and then finally coughed with great resolution. "I suppose,
of course, that I am unjust to him. I care for you myself, you
understand, and so it becomes----"
He paused for a moment because he heard a rustling of her skirts as if
she had moved suddenly. Then he continued: "And so it becomes difficult
for me to be fair to him. I am not able to see him with a true eye." He
bitterly addressed the trees on the opposite side of the glen. "Oh, I
care for you, of course. You might have expected it." He turned from the
trees and strode toward the roadway. The uninformed and disreputable
Stanley arose and wagged his tail.
As if the girl had cried out at a calamity, Hawker said again, "Well,
you might have expected it."