thinned before then, and Dick's party were ready to go by half-past ten. Rob was now very sharp. It did not escape his notice that the gentlemen were bringing the ladies' cloaks, and he calmly made up his mind to help Mary Abinger on with hers. To his annoyance, Sir Clement was too quick for him. The baronet was in the midst of them, with the three ladies' cloaks, just as Rob wondered where he would have to go to find them. Nell's cloak Sir Clement handed to Dick, but he kept Mary's on his arm while he assisted Mrs. Meredith into hers. It was a critical moment. All would be over in five seconds.
'Allow me,' said Rob.
With apparent coolness he took Mary's cloak from the baronet's arm. He had not been used to saying 'allow me,' and his face was white, but he was determined to go on with this thing.
'Take my arm,' he said to Mary, as they joined the crowd that swayed toward the door. After he said it he saw that he had spoken with an air of proprietorship, but he was not sorry. Mary did it.
It took them some time to reach their cab, and on the way Mary asked Rob a question.
'I gave you something once,' she said, 'but I suppose you lost it long ago.'
Rob reddened, for he had been sadly puzzled to know what had become of his Christmas card.
'I have it still,' he answered at last.
'Oh,' said Mary coldly; and at once Rob felt a chill pass through him. It was true, after all, that Miss Abinger could be an icicle on occasion.
Rob, having told a lie, deserved no mercy, and got none. The pity of it is that Mary might have thawed a little had she known that it was only a lie. She thought that Rob was not aware of his loss. A man taking fickleness as the comparative degree of an untruth is perhaps only what may be looked for, but one does not expect it from a woman. Probably the lights had blinded Mary.
Rob had still an opportunity of righting himself, but he did not take it.
'Then you did mean the card for me,' he said, in foolish exultation; 'when I found it on the walk I was not certain that you had not merely dropped it by accident.'
Alas! for the fatuity of man. Mary looked up in icy surprise.
'What card?' she said. 'I don't know what you are talking about.'
'Don't you remember?' asked Rob, very much requiring to be sharpened again.
He looked so woebegone, that Mary nearly had pity on him. She knew, however, that if it was not for her sex, men would never learn anything.
'No,' she replied, and turned to talk to Sir Clement.
Rob walked home from the Langham that night with Dick, and, when he was not thinking of the two Sir Clements, he was telling himself that he had climbed his hill valiantly, only to topple over when he neared the top. Before he went to bed he had an article to finish for the Wire, and, while he wrote, he pondered over the ways of women; which, when you come to think of it, is a droll thing to do.
Mr. Meredith had noticed Rob's dejection at the hotel, and remarked to Nell's mother that he thought Mary was very stiff to Angus. Mrs. Meredith looked sadly at her husband in reply.
'You think so,' she said, mournfully shaking her head at him, 'and so does Richard Abinger. Mr. Angus is as blind as the rest of you.'
'I don't understand,' said Mr. Meredith, with much curiosity.
'Nor do they,' replied his wife contemptuously; 'there are no men so stupid, I think, as the clever ones.'
She could have preached a sermon that night, with the stupid sex for her text.
Chapter XIII.
The House-Boat 'Tawny Owl'
'Mr. Angus, what is an egotist?'
'Don't you know, Miss Meredith?'
'Well, I know in a general sort of way, but not precisely.'
'An egotist is a person who—but why do you want to know?'
'Because just now Mr. Abinger asked me what I was thinking of, and when I said of nothing he called me an egotist.'
'Ah! that kind of egotist is one whose thoughts are too deep for utterance.'
It was twilight. Rob stood on the deck of the house-boat Tawny Owl, looking down at Nell, who sat in the stern, her mother beside her, amid a blaze of Chinese lanterns. Dick lay near them, prone, as he had fallen from a hammock whose one flaw was that it gave way when any one got into it. Mr. Meredith, looking out from one of the saloon windows across the black water that was now streaked with glistening silver, wondered whether he was enjoying himself, and Mary, in a little blue nautical jacket with a cap to match, lay back in a camp-chair on deck with a silent banjo in her hands. Rob was brazening it out in flannels, and had been at such pains to select colours to suit him that the effect was atrocious. He had spent several afternoons at Molesey during the three weeks the Tawny Owl had lain there, but this time he was to remain overnight at the Island Hotel.
The Tawny Owl was part of the hoop of house-boats that almost girded Tagg's Island, and lights sailed through the trees, telling of launches moving to their moorings near the ferry. Now and again there was the echo of music from a distant house-boat. For a moment the water was loquacious as dingeys or punts shot past. Canadian canoes, the ghosts that haunt the Thames by night, lifted their heads out of the river, gaped, and were gone. An osier-wand dipped into the water under a weight of swallows, all going to bed together. The boy on the next house-boat kissed his hand to a broom on board the Tawny Owl, taking it for Mrs. Meredith's servant, and then retired to his kitchen smiling. From the boat-house across the river came the monotonous tap of a hammer. A reed-warbler rushed through his song. There was a soft splashing along the bank.
'There was once a literary character,' Dick murmured, 'who said that to think of nothing was an impossibility, but he lived before the days of house-boats. I came here a week ago to do some high thinking, and I believe I have only managed four thoughts—first, that the cow on the island is an irate cow; second, that in summer the sun shines brightly; third, that the trouble of lighting a cigar is almost as great as the pleasure of smoking it; and fourth, that swans—the fourth thought referred to swans, but it has slipped my memory.'
He yawned like a man glad to get to the end of his sentence, or sorry that he had begun it.
'But I thought,' said Mrs. Meredith, 'that the reason you walk round and round the island by yourself so frequently is because you can think out articles on it?'
'Yes,' Dick answered, 'the island looks like a capital place to think on, and I always start off on my round meaning to think hard. After that all is a blank till I am back at the Tawny Owl, when I remember that I have forgotten to think.'
'Will ought to enjoy this,' remarked Nell.
'That is my brother, Mr. Angus,' Mary said to Rob; 'he is to spend part of his holidays here.'
'I remember him,' Rob answered, smiling. Mary blushed, however, remembering that the last time Will and Greybrooke met Rob there had been a little scene.
