For half an hour she rattled on, dazzling Roger with descriptions of the great world as yet beyond his ken, then her father left them to go out and see his gardeners.
'Well! How shall we spend the day?' she asked, after a pause to regain her breath. 'Shall we ride in the forest, go down the cliff and provide a fresh scandal for the neighbours by bathing from the beach, or take luncheon up to our old haunt in the tower?'
Roger had intended only to spend an hour with her and then return to face his irate parent, but the more he thought of doing so the more unnerving the prospect became. The gravity of the issue was such that his father's anger could scarcely be increased whatever he did now; so he decided that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and spend the day with Georgina, as she obviously expected him to do.
From his ride through the forest on the previous day he knew that the flies were now hatching out in such numbers as to prove irksome during a picnic. The promised heat of the day made a swim sound attractive, and he cared little for the fact that for a young man to bathe with a fully grown girl was frowned upon, but the tower offered the best prospect of a long talk entirely free of any possibility of interruptions, so, after a moment, he voted for it.
Although they had only just finished breakfast Georgina went off to the kitchen to procure supplies; since it entailed no small effort to climb the three hundred odd stairs to the little room at the top of the tower and, once there, to descend and re-ascend for any purpose would have been a foolish waste of time and energy.
A quarter of an hour later she rejoined him in the garden and as she came towards him across the lawn, a well-laden basket over her arm, he thought how seductive she was looking. As always, except when about to go out riding, she was wearing more diaphanous clothes than were usual in the country. A full skirt of sprigged India muslin billowed about her legs and, as the gentle breeze pressed it against her, gave a hint of the shapely limbs beneath it. The sleeves were cut very wide, showing her well-made brown arms to the elbows and a double fichu of white goffered organdie crossed on her breast accentuated the outline of her rounded bosom.
Roger took the basket from her and a few minutes' walk brought them to the base of the tower. Square and unornamented it rose starkly to the sky, the small round cupola which crowned it no longer visible from where they stood. Georgina led the way in through its narrow door, and they began the ascent.
The stairs were narrow and the atmosphere abominably stuffy, being relieved only by air holes consisting of narrow slits at every twenty feet, through which no more than a glimpse could be obtained of the surrounding country. Three times on the way up they paused, hot and panting, to regain their breath, but at last they came out into the turret chamber.
It was a small square apartment, large enough only to contain a brocaded settee, two chairs and a table, but its windows provided an outlook that was probably unrivalled in southern England. Inland. Meadows and cornfields were spread below them, merging into forest and heath, as far as the eye could reach, finally to blend with the sky in purple distances; while to seaward the white coast-line from Durlston Head, beyond Poole, to St. Catherine's Point, at the southern extremity of the Isle of Wight, lay unrolled to their gaze like some gargantuan map; and the white sails of ships could be seen far out at sea.
They knew that the tower was quite safe, although it always seemed to sway slightly as the wind moaned round its top in winter and summer alike. Yet this, and being so far above the earth, had never failed to give them a rather queer feeling ever since they had come to favour it as a retreat on account of its absolute privacy. Since Colonel Thursby received no visitors, no one except themselves ever came there and, even had strangers done so, the echo of their footsteps on the stone stairs would have given warning of then-approach at least several minutes before they could have reached the turret chamber. It was, therefore, an ideal place for two young conspirators to make plans and exchange confidences.
Having gazed their fill at the view, they settled themselves side by side on the settee.
'Well, little boy,' said Georgina with an air of superiority. 'Tell me about yourself? Hast thou done well at thy lessons this term or been the recipient of many birchings?'
'I'm not a' little boy,' Roger protested hotly, 'And don't you try to play the fine lady with me, just because you've been to Court and done a season.'
She laughed. 'Oh, Roger! Should I live to be a hundred I'll never forgo teasing you, and I vow you'll still rise to it. All the same, you may like it or not, but having been presented makes a woman of me.'
'It takes more than that to make a girl into a woman,' he scoffed.
'That's as maybe, m'dear, but at all events you can lay no claim
yet to being a man.'
'Another few weeks will see me one—unless....'
As he broke off her big eyes opened wide. 'Unless what? Whatever
do you mean?'
'Oh, God!' he burst out. 'How much rather I'd remain a boy and be going back to Sherborne!' Then he suddenly buried his face in his hands.
'Why, Roger, dear!' She threw a warm arm round his shoulders and pulled his head down into her lap. 'What is it? Do tell me. We've never had any secrets from each other, and never shall.'
For a moment, conscious of her soft thigh against his forehead, he allowed that pleasant but disturbing sensation to distract his thoughts, then he muttered: 'Of course I'll tell you. It's all right. I'm not blubbering. I'm too scared and angry to do that.'
She released him, but seeing his distress, took one of his hands between her own, seeking by their firm pressure to give him strength, as she commanded: 'Out with it, now!'
Roger gulped back the tears he had denied, and that neither Gunston nor his father had been able to draw from him. Then, bit by bit, half incoherently at first but graduating to a fierce, steady monologue of pent-up resentment, he poured out to her the story of the day before and the hideous fate that he now felt menaced him.
Her dark eyes fixed intently on him she let him ease himself of his burden without interruption, until he at last fell silent; then she said:
'But Roger, this is monstrous. Can you not appeal to your mother to make your father see reason?'
He shrugged. 'My mother thinks more of him than she does of God. She loves me, but she'd never intervene; and 'twould be useless if she tried.'
'Your other relatives, then?'
'I have none, except my mother's people whom I've never seen. My father, like myself, was an only son.' 'But you cannot submit to this?' 'What other course is open to me?'
'God knows, m'dear; but the injustice of it makes my blood boil.'
For the best part of another hour they talked round and round the subject without corning any nearer to a solution. The sun was now well up in the heavens and striking down on the stone cupola of the tower made the turret room close and hot. Roger got up to open one of the windows and stripping off his long-skirted coat flung it over the back of a chair.
They had fallen silent again. The wind had dropped and up there in their eerie no sound reached them from the earth far below. Roger felt, as he had often felt before in the turret, as if he was in a different world that had no connection with the life he knew. There was something God-like in being at that high altitude from which the men working in the fields looked to be no more than pigmies. Time seemed to be standing still, and even the interview that he so dreaded coming no nearer despite the steady mounting of the sun which, with the passing of a few more hours, must inevitably set.
Suddenly Georgina spoke: 'Roger! There's but one thing for it. You must run away.'
'What's that!' he swung round to stare at her. 'Run away! How can I? Where to?'
'Romantic young fools are always mining away to sea,' she declared. 'Why shouldn't you run away from it?'
'But there is nowhere I could go?' he faltered.
She tossed her black ringlets impatiently. 'The world is wide and you are strong and healthy. These summer months you might do worse than go to live with the Egyptians in the forest, or you could make your way to London and find some employment there.'
'No,' he shook his head glumly, ' 'tis too drastic a measure that you propose, and the remedy would prove a greater affliction than the illness. By it I'd cease to be all that I am and lose such small advantages as my birth and education give me. I'm determined to make something worth while of my life, and 'twould be the height of folly to
