monosyllable fell from her like a stone.
"I will do my best," he said.
She turned again and led him back through the coppice. The air was sultrier than ever, heavy with fragrance and enervating with forebodings of a storm. And now, as the girl preceded him, her step seemed more listless than before. She is tired, he reflected. These noons are fierce.
"You are to be with us some time, are you not?" Liance asked.
"No, a day or two at the most. When the next steamer goes, so must I."
"Could you not stay longer?" She stopped and looked at him, the little basket swaying to and fro.
"I should like to, really I should like to very much," he replied. The episode with Mrs. Lyeth was still oppressing him, and in answer to the oppression he added aloud, "But perhaps it is better I should not."
Liance lowered her eyes, and with the point of her shoe tormented a tuft of grass.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because – well, because I feel an intruder."
The girl raised her eyes at once, her lips quivered.
"You are wrong, so wrong."
And then, curiously enough, as such things happen, Tancred – who was not a bit stupider than the rest of us – felt an oracle within him. It was more than probable, he told himself, that widow and maid, being nearly of an age, had, in their Sumatran idleness, become the fastest friends; and at once, with that logic which is peculiar to those that love, he decided that, being friends, they must be confidantes as well, and he concluded that two fair heads had come together and determined he should remain. That woman is variable, was a song he knew by heart, and he also knew that woman is apt to do one thing and mean another – to dismiss, for instance, the very man whom she wishes most at her feet.
These ruminations, however long in the telling, did not in reality outlast a moment's space. It was all very clear to him now, and his blood pulsed quickly.
"If you tell me so, I must indeed be wrong," he answered. "And let me add," he continued, impetuously, "it is a boon to know it."
To his face a flush had come, and his eyes were eager. He had never been accounted anything else than good-looking, but now he was attractive as well.
"You will not be in haste to go, then?"
"In haste to go – " His face completed the sentence. "Tell her from me," he was about to say, when from the girl's loosening fingers the basket fell; she drooped like a flower, her eyes half closed, and he had but the time to hold out his arm when she sank unconscious on it.
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