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His mind moved in a circle, coming back to the one point ceaselessly a dreary prospect, in which that slender girl-figure had no place and each time the prospect grew more intolerably blank, and the pain in his heart more acute and throbbing. When he faced her that night, after they had returned from a final walk down by the river, he was as far from a solution as ever.
Mawle, and that pale fairy girl-figure were all enmeshed in the same scheme with plants, insects, animals and planets; and that God's voice was everywhere too sublimely close all this, when he was alone, oppressed him with a sense of things that were too intimate and too mighty for daily life.
At the corner of a dingy alley Rose could see a fight going on; the begrimed ragged children, regardless of the April rain, swooped backwards and forwards under the very hoofs of the horses, or flattened their noses against the windows whenever the horses were forced into a walk. The young girl-figure in gray, with the gray feathered hat, seemed specially to excite their notice.
And if her surroundings were poetic, how much more so was the girl-figure itself! the slender form, the dark head, and that shrinking joy which spoke in her gesture, in the movement she made toward him across the room. She checked it at once, but not before a certain wildness in it had let loose upon him a rush of delight. "Sir James explained?" he said, as he took her hand. "Yes.
So no doubt the second girl-figure was that of Beryl Chicksands, and the other gentleman in khaki was probably Captain Chicksands, for whom Desmond seemed to cherish a boyish hero-worship. They had been all lunching together at Chetworth, she supposed. She watched them coming, with a curious mingling of interest in them and detachment from them. She was to them merely the Squire's paid secretary.
His mind moved in a circle, coming back to the one point ceaselessly a dreary prospect, in which the slender girl-figure had no place and each time the prospect grew more intolerably blank, and the pain in his heart more acute and throbbing. When he faced her that night, after they had returned from a final skating party down on the river, he was as far from a solution as ever.
Occasionally Honey Smith re-told a story which, from the introduction of a shadowy girl-figure, became mysteriously more interesting and compelling. Once or twice they nearly went over the border-line of legitimate confidence, so intimate had their talk become muffled as it was by the velvety, star-sown dark and interrupted only by the unheeded thunders of the surf.
At this point she became aware of a group on the high road far to her right. A pony-cart a girl driving it a man in khaki beside her; with a second girl-figure and another khaki-clad warrior, walking near. She presently thought she recognized Pamela's pony and Pamela herself.
God, let him come in time!... Brett! Brett! Brett!..." The retreating wave revealed once more the slight girl-figure, spent and effortless this time, tossing impotently in the churning backwash. Forrester would be too late! A third wave would batter the life out of that fragile body. Cara's voice died into a strangled sob of despair.
The girl-figure who walked in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her companion was more blurred and undefined, as a picture that has been superimposed on another. Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself. To-morrow, he reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her morning paper, and he knew in advance that it was not going to be one of his worst efforts.
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