The carriage was put up at a little cottage with a shed attached, and an ostler and the coachman carried the hamper of provisions down to the shore.
Knight found his opportunity. “I did not forget your wish,” he began, when they were apart from their friends.
Elfride looked as if she did not understand.
“And I have brought you these,” he continued, awkwardly pulling out the case, and opening it while holding it towards her.
“O Mr. Knight!” said Elfride confusedly, and turning to a lively red; “I didn’t know you had any intention or meaning in what you said. I thought it a mere supposition. I don’t want them.”
A thought which had flashed into her mind gave the reply a greater decisiveness than it might otherwise have possessed. Tomorrow was the day for Stephen’s letter.
“But will you not accept them?” Knight returned, feeling less her master than heretofore.
“I would rather not. They are beautiful—more beautiful than any I have ever seen,” she answered earnestly, looking half-wishfully at the temptation, as Eve may have looked at the apple. “But I don’t want to have them, if you will kindly forgive me, Mr. Knight.”
“No kindness at all,” said Mr. Knight, brought to a full stop at this unexpected turn of events.
A silence followed. Knight held the open case, looking rather woefully at the glittering forms he had forsaken his orbit to procure; turning it about and holding it up as if, feeling his gift to be slighted by her, he were endeavouring to admire it very much himself.
“Shut them up, and don’t let me see them any longer—do!” she said laughingly, and with a quaint mixture of reluctance and entreaty.
“Why, Elfie?”
“Not Elfie to you, Mr. Knight. Oh, because I shall want them. There, I am silly, I know, to say that! But I have a reason for not taking them—now.” She kept in the last word for a moment, intending to imply that her refusal was finite, but somehow the word slipped out, and undid all the rest.
“You will take them some day?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why don’t you want to, Elfride Swancourt?”
“Because I don’t. I don’t like to take them.”
“I have read a fact of distressing significance in that,” said Knight. “Since you like them, your dislike to having them must be towards me?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What, then? Do you like me?”
Elfride deepened in tint, and looked into the distance with features shaped to an expression of the nicest criticism as regarded her answer.
“I like you pretty well,” she at length murmured mildly.
“Not very much?”
“You are so sharp with me, and say hard things, and so how can I?” she replied evasively.
“You think me a fogey, I suppose?”
“No, I don’t—I mean I do—I don’t know what I think you, I mean. Let us go to papa,” responded Elfride, with somewhat of a flurried delivery.
“Well, I’ll tell you my object in getting the present,” said Knight, with a composure intended to remove from her mind any possible impression of his being what he was—her lover. “You see it was the very least I could do in common civility.”
Elfride felt rather blank at this lucid statement.
Knight continued, putting away the case: “I felt as anybody naturally would have, you know, that my words on your choice the other day were invidious and unfair, and thought an apology should take a practical shape.”
“Oh yes.”
Elfride was sorry—she could not tell why—that he gave such a legitimate reason. It was a disappointment that he had all the time a cool motive, which might be stated to anybody without raising a smile. Had she known they were offered in that spirit, she would certainly have accepted the seductive gift. And the tantalizing feature was that perhaps he suspected her to imagine them offered as a lover’s token, which was mortifying enough if they were not.
Mrs. Swancourt came now to where they were sitting, to select a flat boulder for spreading their tablecloth upon, and, amid the discussion on that subject, the matter pending between Knight and Elfride was shelved for a while. He read her refusal so certainly as the bashfulness of a girl in a novel position, that, upon the whole, he could tolerate such a beginning. Could Knight have been told that it was a sense of fidelity struggling against new love, whilst no less assuring as to his ultimate victory, it might have entirely abstracted the wish to secure it.
At the same time a slight constraint of manner was visible between them for the remainder of the afternoon. The tide turned, and they were obliged to ascend to higher ground. The day glided on to its end with the usual quiet dreamy passivity of such occasions—when every deed done and thing thought is in endeavouring to avoid doing and thinking more. Looking idly over the verge of a crag, they beheld their stone dining-table gradually being splashed upon and their crumbs and fragments all washed away by the incoming sea. The vicar drew a moral lesson from the scene; Knight replied in the same satisfied strain. And then the waves rolled in furiously—the neutral green-and-blue tongues of water slid up the slopes, and were metamorphosed into foam by a careless blow, falling back white and faint, and leaving trailing followers behind.
The passing of a heavy shower was the next scene—driving them to shelter in a shallow cave—after which the horses were put in, and they started to return homeward. By the time they reached the higher levels the sky had again cleared, and the sunset rays glanced directly upon the wet uphill road they had climbed. The ruts formed by their carriage-wheels on the ascent—a pair of Liliputian canals—were
