Their landlady entered the room to lay the cloth for tea and eggs. She made offer of bacon as well, homecured. She was a Hampshire woman, and understood the rearing of pigs. Her husband had been a cricketer, and played for his county. He didn't often beat Hampshire! They had a good garden of vegetables, and grass-land enough for two cows. They made their own bread, their own butter, but did not brew.
Weyburn pronounced for a plate of her home-cured. She had children, the woman told him--two boys and a girl. Her husband wished for a girl. Her eldest boy wished to be a sailor, and would walk miles to a pond to sail bits of wood on it, though there had never been a sea-faring man in her husband's family or her own. She agreed with the lady and gentleman that it might be unwise to go contrary to the boy's bent. Going to school or coming home, a trickle of water would stop him.
Aminta said to her companion in French, 'Have you money?'
She chased his blood. 'Some: sufficient. I think.' It stamped their partnership.
'I have but a small amount. Aunt was our paymaster. We will buy the little boy a boat to sail. You are pale.'
'It would not have damaged my complexion.'
He counted his money. Aminta covertly handed him her purse. Their fingers touched. The very minor circumstance of their landlady being in the room dammed a flood.
Her money and his amounted to seventeen pounds. The sum-total was a symbol of days that were a fiery wheel.
Honour and blest adventure might travel together two days or three, he thought. If the chariot did not pass:--Lord Ormont had willed it. A man could not be said to swerve in his duty when acting to fulfil the master's orders, and Mrs. Pagnell was proved a hoodwinked duenna, and Morsfield was in the air. The breathing Aminta had now a common purse with her first lover. For three days or more they were, it would seem, to journey together, alone together: the prosecution of his duty imposed it on him. Sooth to say, Weyburn knew that a spice of passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess; but he fancied an absolute reliance on Aminta's dignity, and his respect for her was another barrier. He begged the landlady's acceptance of two shillings for her boy's purchase of a boat, advising her to have him taught early to swim. Both he and Aminta had a feeling that they could be helpful in some little things on the road if the chariot did not pass.