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.