"Ah," said Jim, "I think I see! You wanted to give me a chance to drop you? Did you think I would?"
"No," said Carrie, blushing. "But it was possible. Cutting the line was different; it was a business proposition." She paused and added with a hint of regret: "It's finished now."
Carrie said nothing and he went on: "Was Jake's throwing up his job and bringing me down from the shack a business proposition? Your nursing me and our long talks by the camp fire? Did you think I could forget these things? Did you want me to forget?"
She looked up, with some color in her face. "Not in a way, Jim, but we took the proper line. We felt you ought to have a chance to let us go."
"And now I hope you're satisfied, since you have found out I'm not as shabby as you thought."
"Oh, well," said Carrie, smiling, "I suppose we do feel some satisfaction."
Then Jake and Mrs. Winter returned and they went to the Canadian Pacific station, where Jim asked about the steamship sailings.
The car ran out from the tall hedgerows that bordered the narrow road and at length Jim could look about. He had not been able to see much on his way from the station where Mordaunt had met him, and now he had an unbroken view he studied the English landscape with keen curiosity. On one side, rugged mountains rose against the lowering sky, but a moving ray of sunshine touched the plain below. In front, the road ran across a marsh, between deep ditches where tall sedges grew. Beyond the marsh, wet sands stretched back to the blurred woods across a bay, and farther off, low hills loomed indistinctly in the mist.
Jim noted that the landscape had not the monotony he had sometimes felt in Canada. The fields behind the marsh looked ridiculously small, but some were smooth and green and some dotted by yellow stocks of corn. Then there was a play of color that changed from cold blues and grays to silver and ochre as the light came and went. White farmsteads, standing among dark trees, were scattered about, but the country was not tame. The hills and wide belt of sands gave it a rugged touch. There had been some rain and the wind was cold.
As the car jolted along the straight road between the ditches, Jim began to muse. He had felt a stranger in London, where he had stopped a week. He knew the Canadian cities, but London was different. Yet since he left the station the feeling of strangeness had gone; it was as if he had reached a country that he knew. He wondered whether he unconsciously remembered his father's talk, or if the curious sense of familiarity was, so to speak, atavistic. This, however, was not important, and he glanced at Carrie, who sat behind with Mrs. Winter and Jake.