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      Chapter XIV.

       Mary of the Stony Heart

       Table of Contents

      A punt and a rowing-boat were racing lazily toward Sunbury on a day so bright that you might have passed women with their hair in long curls and forgiven them.

      'I say, Dick,' said one of the scullers, 'are they engaged?'

      Will was the speaker, and in asking the question he caught a crab. Mary, with her yellow sleeves turned up at the wrist, a great straw hat on her head, ran gaily after her pole, and the punt jerked past. If there are any plain girls let them take to punting and be beautiful.

      Dick, who was paddling rather than pulling stroke, turned round on his young brother sharply.

      'Whom do you mean?' he asked, speaking low, so that the other occupants of the boat should not hear him, 'Mary and Dowton?'

      'No,' said Will, 'Mary and Angus. I wonder what they see in her.'

      They were bound for a picnicking resort up the river; Mrs. Meredith, Mary, and Sir Clement in the punt, and the others in the boat. If Rob was engaged he took it gloomily. He sat in the stern with Mr. Meredith, while Nell hid herself away beneath a many-coloured umbrella in the prow; and when he steered the boat into a gondola, he only said vacantly to its occupants, 'It is nothing at all,' as if they had run into him. Nell's father said something about not liking the appearance of the sky, and Rob looked at him earnestly for such a length of time before replying that Mr. Meredith was taken aback. At times the punt came alongside, and Mary addressed every one in the boat except Rob. The only person in the punt whom Rob never looked at was Mary. Dick watched them uneasily, and noticed that once, when Mary nearly followed her pole into the water, Rob, who seemed to be looking in the opposite direction, was the first to see what had happened. Then Dick pulled so savagely that he turned the boat round.

      That morning at breakfast in his chambers Rob had no thought of spending the day on the river. He had to be at the Wire office at ten o'clock in the evening, and during the day he meant to finish one of the many articles which he still wrote for other journals that would seldom take them. The knowledge that Sir Clement Dowton had been to Molesey disquieted him, chiefly because Mary Abinger had said nothing about it. Having given himself fifty reasons for her reticence, he pushed them from him, and vowed wearily that he would go to the house-boat no more. Then Dick walked in to suggest that they might run down for an hour or two to Molesey, and Rob agreed at once. He shaped out in the train a subtle question about Sir Clement that he intended asking Mary, but on reaching the plank he saw her feeding the swans, with the baronet by her side. Rob felt like a conjurer whose trick has not worked properly. Giving himself just half a minute to reflect that it was all over, he affected the coldly courteous, and smiled in a way that was meant to be heart-rending. Mary did not mind that, but it annoyed her to see the band of his necktie slipping over his collar.

      It was the day of the Sunbury Regatta, but the party from the Tawny Owl twisted past the racers, leaving Dick, who wanted a newspaper, behind. When he rejoined them beyond the village, the boat was towing the punt.

      'Why,' said Dick, in some astonishment to Rob, who was rowing now, 'I did not know you could scull like that.'

      'I have been practising a little,' answered Rob.

      'When he came down here the first time,' Mrs. Meredith explained to Sir Clement, 'he did not know how to hold an oar. I am afraid he is one of those men who like to be best at everything.'

      'He certainly knows how to scull now,' admitted the baronet, beginning to think that Rob was perhaps a dangerous man. Sir Clement was a manly gentleman, but his politics were that people should not climb out of the station they were born into.

      'No,' Dick said, in answer to a question from Mr. Meredith, 'I could only get a local paper. The woman seemed surprised at my thinking she would take in the Scalping Knife or the Wire, and said, "We've got a paper of our own."'

      'Read out the news to us, Richard,' suggested Mrs. Meredith. Dick hesitated.

      'Here, Will,' he said to his brother, 'you got that squeaky voice of yours specially to proclaim the news from a boat to a punt ten yards distant. Angus is longing to pull us up the river unaided.'

      Will turned the paper round and round.

      'Here is a funny thing,' he bawled out, 'about a stick. "A curious story, says a London correspondent, is going the round of the clubs to-day about the walking-stick of a well-known member of Parliament, whose name I am not at liberty to mention. The story has not, so far as I am aware, yet appeared in print, and it conveys a lesson to all persons who carry walking-sticks with knobs for handles, which generate a peculiar disease in the palm of the hand. The member of Parliament referred to, with whom I am on intimate terms——"'

      Rob looked at Dick, and they both groaned.

      'My stick again,' murmured Rob.

      'Read something else,' cried Dick, shivering.

      'Eh, what is wrong?' asked Mr. Meredith.

      'You must know,' said Dick, 'that the first СКАЧАТЬ