CHAPTER XLIII

Owen and I were standing by the low sea-wall, looking out across the wet brown sands, when I saw her. It was a gray, cloudy day, and the air was full of mist and damp, which hung in heavy, livid-coloured veils over the black mountain-tops, and sometimes dropped half way down the slopes. The tide was out and the noise of the waves sounded remote and musical. The broad stretch of wet sand and shingle reached out to the cold, gray-green sea, with its white curling line of foam; and at the water’s edge, a little bent forward, her light dress floating out behind her in the fresh wind, one hand raised, holding the brim of her big black hat, she moved along, a solitary figure against the broad line of sea and sky. It was Katherine, and as I watched her it struck me that the whole picture, from her presence in it, became curiously like a Whistler water-colour. The next thing I noticed was that Katherine was quite grown-up, which had the effect of producing in me a sudden shyness, so that I made no attempt to go to meet her. Yet here was the meeting I had lain awake half the night imagining! I had an almost overpowering impulse to turn tail and slink away, and perhaps I might have done so had I been alone.

Owen, who took no more interest in girls than in octogenarians, asked me what I was staring at.

“At Miss Dale,” I answered.

“Who’s Miss Dale?”

“Katherine.”

“And who is Katherine?”

“Mrs. Carroll’s niece.”

Then Owen looked at me in surprise. “Aren’t you going to speak to her? I thought you knew her very well?”

“So I do.”

We clambered over the wall and crossed the beach to intercept her path. My idiotic nervousness was increased by Owen’s presence. She had noticed our approach now, and altered her own course to meet us. As she came up she smiled with her bright frank smile and held out her hand. She was perfectly natural and easy in her greeting, while I began to stammer and splutter. I managed to introduce Owen, saying he had come down yesterday, and we all three walked on together.

“I wondered if I should see you,” she said. “We arrived this morning. Gerald is up at the house, but I had to come out and get some fresh air after our travels.”

“There’s p――plenty of it at all events,” I stuttered.

“I like it. I like wind,” she added, turning her smile upon Owen. “Don’t you? It’s very nice to be back here again. I always love coming back to any place I know.”

“When the tide is out it looks like a Whistler water-colour,” I went on, thinking it a pity that this should be lost.

But probably neither Katherine nor Owen had ever heard of Whistler. “It looks to me very like rain,” said the former, glancing at the heavy clouds over Slieve Donard. Owen took no notice at all of my remark. “Conversation means nothing to Owen,” I reflected, impatiently, “unless it takes the form of argument. Anything merely suggestive or decorative is lost upon him.” And I felt annoyed because they had both begun to chatter commonplaces about Katherine’s journey――what kind of passage she had had; as if it mattered!

Then I became lost in contemplation of her. A year had certainly made a tremendous difference! “Last winter she probably came out,” I said to myself, with vague memories of Miss Broughton’s novels. At all events, in twelve months she had managed to put at least five years between us. It was quite conceivable that she was already engaged to be married, while I was but a timid school-boy, who could only envy from afar the happiness of her lover. And the thought that perhaps there _was_ a lover cast a vivid illumination on my own feeling for her, made plainer than ever the difference, how carefully veiled soever, between friendship and love. I loved her with that love which, idealize it as I might, was really the expression of a simple law of nature.

Meanwhile she was talking to Owen, who was explaining to her some theory of the influence of the tides upon the earth, and of the moon on the tides. How, in the first five minutes, he had contrived to get on to such a subject I could not guess. It was fearfully like him, nevertheless, and Katherine appeared to be interested.

No matter in what company he found himself Owen never talked about anything except the things he was interested in. Last night it had been a little delicious to hear him discuss Plato’s “Republic” with Miss Dick, who, though immensely pleased, was always at her silliest when taken seriously. To converse with Miss Dick was like trying to get a definite impression from a kaleidoscope; you no sooner fixed your attention on one particular idea than it dissolved into something quite different. And yet Miss Dick had views――political, religious, social,――derived from a deceased parent, who had been an apostle of free thought. Only she would interrupt her expression of the profoundest of these to wonder if Sissie McIldowie was really engaged to young Stevenson.

And now Owen was talking to Katherine about the tides. I watched her and knew she liked him. She liked his rough brown mane, his clear eyes, with their kindness and innocence, for Owen, in spite of the “Kreutzer Sonata” and the rest, was as innocent as a child. There was something fine about Owen, and it was very visible in his face.

At present he quite monopolized the conversation, turning it into a sort of scientific discourse; and I knew so well that he had been reading some little book about tides――probably in the train on his way down. I yawned two or three times when he looked in my direction, but I might have spared myself the rudeness, for it had not the slightest effect upon him while Katherine kept on asking questions as if she found what he said absorbing. My apparent indifference simply had the result of producing a _tête-à-tête_ between them.

“You ought to become a University Extension lecturer,” I said, maliciously. “You should write and ask Tolstoy about it.”

It was a highly disagreeable remark to make, and as soon as I had said it I was filled with shame. Owen coloured and stopped talking at once. I was very sorry. Inwardly I went down on my knees to him and begged his pardon, but outwardly I showed only a sullen stolidity. I said something to Katherine, but she answered coldly, and turned again to Owen as if to make up to him for my bad manners. And at this my remorse degenerated into sulkiness.

Nevertheless, as we walked home together, I had the grace to apologize. “I’m sorry for what I said,” I muttered. “It was a most beastly thing to say. It’s not so much because it was rude as because it was rotten.”

This distinction I cannot undertake here to explain; let it suffice that in my mind it was a very clearly defined one.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Owen. “I always do talk either too much or too little.”

After tea we went for a long walk and discussed all our old subjects. But in my present mood they bored me, though I was determined not to show it. What I really wanted just then was to be alone, that I might recall the past and make plans for the future. We went to bed when we came in, but long after Owen had dropped asleep I lay awake, wrapped in beautiful, desolating dreams. I gave Owen a gentle kick, for he had begun to snore, which troubled the quiet that was necessary for the perfect enjoyment of my visions. It woke him up, which was not what I had intended, but it couldn’t be helped, and, before he had dropped asleep again, I was myself lost in slumber.