Chance

I remarked that a man of thirty-five was no longer a boy. It was an

obvious remark but she received it without favour. She told me

positively that the best, the nicest men remained boys all their lives.

She was disappointed not to be able to detect anything boyish in her

brother. Very, very sorry. She had not seen him for fifteen years or

thereabouts, except on three or four occasions for a few hours at a time.

No. Not a trace of the boy, he used to be, left in him.

She fell silent for a moment and I mused idly on the boyhood of little

Fyne. I could not imagine what it might have been like. His dominant

trait was clearly the remnant of still earlier days, because I've never

seen such staring solemnity as Fyne's except in a very young baby. But

where was he all that time? Didn't he suffer contamination from the

indolence of Captain Anthony, I inquired. I was told that Mr. Fyne was

very little at the cottage at the time. Some colleague of his was

convalescing after a severe illness in a little seaside village in the

neighbourhood and Fyne went off every morning by train to spend the day

with the elderly invalid who had no one to look after him. It was a very

praiseworthy excuse for neglecting his brother-in-law "the son of the

poet, you know," with whom he had nothing in common even in the remotest

degree. If Captain Anthony (Roderick) had been a pedestrian it would

have been sufficient; but he was not. Still, in the afternoon, he went

sometimes for a slow casual stroll, by himself of course, the children

having definitely cold-shouldered him, and his only sister being busy

with that inflammatory book which was to blaze upon the world a year or

more afterwards. It seems however that she was capable of detaching her

eyes from her task now and then, if only for a moment, because it was

from that garret fitted out for a study that one afternoon she observed

her brother and Flora de Barral coming down the road side by side. They

had met somewhere accidentally (which of them crossed the other's path,

as the saying is, I don't know), and were returning to tea together. She

noticed that they appeared to be conversing without constraint.

"I had the simplicity to be pleased," Mrs. Fyne commented with a dry

little laugh. "Pleased for both their sakes." Captain Anthony shook off

his indolence from that day forth, and accompanied Miss Flora frequently

on her morning walks. Mrs. Fyne remained pleased. She could now forget

them comfortably and give herself up to the delights of audacious thought

and literary composition. Only a week before the blow fell she,

happening to raise her eyes from the paper, saw two figures seated on the

grass under the shade of the elms. She could make out the white blouse.

There could be no mistake.