“I must be going,” he said, over loudly,
and Garratt Skinner smiled.
“I’m afraid she won’t hear that,”
he said softly, measuring with his eyes the distance
between the group and the house. “But come
again, Captain Chayne, and sit it out.”
Chayne flushed with anger. He said, “Thank
you,” and tried to say it jauntily and failed.
He took his leave and walked across the lawn to the
garden, trying to assume a carriage of indifference
and dignity. But every moment he expected to
hear the two whom he had left laughing at his discomfiture.
Neither, however, did laugh. Walter Hine was,
indeed, indignant.
“Why did you ask him to come again?” he
asked, angrily, as the garden door closed upon Chayne.
Garratt Skinner laid his hand on Walter Hine’s
arm.
“Don’t you worry, Wallie,” he said,
confidentially. “Every time Chayne comes
here he loses ten marks. Give him rope! He
does not, after all, know a great deal of geography.”
KENYON’S JOHN LATTERY
Chayne returned to London on the following day, restless
and troubled. Jealousy, he knew, was the natural
lot of the lover. But that he should have to
be jealous of a Walter Hine—there was the
sting. He asked the old question over and over
again, the old futile question which the unrewarded
suitor puts to himself with amazement and a despair
at the ridiculous eccentricities of human nature.
“What in the world can she see in the fellow?”
However, he did not lose heart. It was not in
his nature to let go once he had clearly set his desires
upon a particular goal. Sooner or later, people
and things would adjust themselves to their proper
proportions in Sylvia’s eyes. Meanwhile
there was something to be done—a doubt
to be set at rest, perhaps a discovery to be made.
His conversation with Garratt Skinner, the subject
which Garratt Skinner had chosen, and the knowledge
with which he had spoken, had seemed to Chayne rather
curious. A man might sit by his fireside and follow
with interest, nay almost with the passion of the
mountaineer, the history of Alpine exploration and
adventure. That had happened before now.
And very likely Chayne would have troubled himself
no more about Garratt Skinner’s introduction
of the theme but for one or two circumstances which
the more he reflected upon them became the more significant.
For instance: Garratt Skinner had spoken and
had asked questions about the new ascents made, the
new passes crossed within the last twenty years, just
as a man would ask who had obtained his knowledge
out of books. But of the earlier ascents he had
spoken differently, though the difference was subtle
and hard to define. He seemed to be upon more
familiar ground. He left in Chayne’s mind
a definite suspicion that he was speaking no longer
out of books, but from an intimate personal knowledge,
the knowledge of actual experience. The suspicion
had grown up gradually, but it had strengthened almost
into a conviction.
