“There was no time to think,” he answered, “and I wasn’t taking any chances.”

But the savagery of the whole affair stuck in Lloyd’s imagination.  There was a primitiveness, a certain hideous simplicity in the way Bennett had met the situation that filled her with wonder and with even a little terror and mistrust of him.  The vast, brutal directness of the deed was out of place and incongruous at this end-of-the-century time.  It ignored two thousand years of civilisation.  It was a harsh, clanging, brazen note, powerful, uncomplicated, which came jangling in, discordant and inharmonious with the tune of the age.  It savoured of the days when men fought the brutes with their hands or with their clubs.  But also it was an indication of a force and a power of mind that stopped at nothing to attain its ends, that chose the shortest cut, the most direct means, disdainful of hesitation, holding delicacy and finessing in measureless contempt, rushing straight to its object, driving in, breaking down resistance, smashing through obstacles with a boundless, crude, blind Brobdignag power, to oppose which was to be trampled under foot upon the instant.

It was long before their talk turned from the incident of the morning, but when it did its subject was Richard Ferriss.  Bennett was sounding his praises and commending upon his pluck and endurance during the retreat from the ship, when Lloyd, after hesitating once or twice, asked: 

“How is Mr. Ferriss?  In your note you said he was ill.”

“So he is,” he told her, “and I could not have left him if I was not sure I was doing him harm by staying.  But the doctor is to wire me if he gets any worse, and only if he does.  I am to believe that no news is good news.”

But this meeting with Lloyd and the intense excitement of those few moments by the canal had quite driven from Bennett’s mind the fact that he had not forwarded his present address either to Ferriss or to his doctor.  He had so intended that morning, but all the faculties of his mind were suddenly concentrated upon another issue.  For the moment he believed that he had actually written to Dr. Pitts, as he had planned, and when he thought of his intended message at all, thought of it as an accomplished fact.  The matter did not occur to him again.

As he walked by Lloyd’s side, listening to her and talking to her, snapping the whip the while, or flicking the heads from the mullein stalks by the roadside with its lash, he was thinking how best he might say to her what he had come from the City to say.  To lead up to his subject, to guide the conversation, to prepare the right psychological moment skilfully and without apparent effort, were maneuvers in the game that Bennett ignored and despised.  He knew only that he loved her, that she was there at his side, that the object of all his desires and hopes was within his reach.  Straight as a homing pigeon he went to his goal.