“Where?”

He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would not answer.  She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a game of it to cover her near approach to tears.  Then he told her, not because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed to put him in a good humour.  “We’re going to the registrar, my dear, to fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks’ time.”

The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.  He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more suitable to a smaller man.  Oh, he was terribly different to-day!  His eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full.  She screamed “Oh, no!  Oh, no!” without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was crying out.

He laughed and pulled her down on his knees.  He was laughing more than she had ever known him laugh before.  “Why, don’t you want to, you little thing?”

Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some reason.  But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet, unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.  She said feebly, as one who asks for water:  “Please, please take me down to the sea-wall.”

His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness.  “But why don’t you want to come and see about our marriage?  Are you frightened, dear?”

Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and said:  “Nellie, ma wee lassie, dis onything ail ye?” and yet left her with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of curiosity and not because he really cared for her.  She was dizzied.  Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard.  She muttered:  “Yes, a little.”

He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine.  “Frightened of me, my darling?”

She pulled herself off his knee.  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Why?  Why?”

She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her.  The immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr. Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh.  That man had hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects was not so great as she would have hoped.  She could bear it no longer, and screamed out:  “Oh!  Oh!  That’s how Mr. Philip looked!”