Jack roared with laughter at her. She seemed rather to like being laughed at. And her odd, cool, precise intensity tickled him to death.
"You want to be virgin in the virgin bush?" he asked.
She glanced at him quickly.
"Something like that," she said, with her little chuckle. "I think later on, not now, not now—" she shook her head—"I might like to be a man's second or third wife: if the other two were living. I would never be the first. Never. You remember you talked about it."
She looked at him with her round, bright, odd eyes, like an elf or some creature of the border-land, and as he roared with laughter, she smiled quickly and with an odd, mischievous response.
"What you said the other night, when Aunt Matilda was so angry, made me think of it.—She hates you," she added.
"Who, Aunt Matilda? Good job."
"Yes, very good job! Don't you think she's terrible?"
"I do," said Jack.
"I'm glad you do. I can't stand her. I like Mr. George. But I don't care for it when he seems to like me."
Jack roared with laughter again, and again, from some odd corner of herself, she smiled.
"Why do you laugh?" she said. But the infection of laughter made her give a little chuckle.
"It's all such a real joke," he said.
"It is," she answered. "Rather a bad joke."
Slowly he formed a dim idea of her precise life, with a rather tyrannous father who was fond of her in the wrong way, and brothers who had bullied her and jeered at her for her odd ways and appearance, and her slight deafness. The governess who had mis-educated her, the loneliness of the life in London, the aristocratic but rather vindictive society in England, which had persecuted her in a small way, because she was one of the odd border-line people who don't and can't, really belong. She kept an odd, bright, amusing spark of revenge twinkling in her all the time. She felt that with Jack she could kindle her spark of revenge into a natural sun. And without any compunction, she came to tell him.
He was tremendously amused. She was a new thing to him. She was one who knew the world, and society, better than he did, and her hatred of it was purer, more twinkling, more relentless in a quiet way. Her way was absolutely relentless, and absolutely quiet. She had gone further along that line than himself. And her fearlessness was of a queer, uncanny quality, hardly human. She was a real border-line being.
"All right," he said, making a pact with her. "By Christmas we'll ask you to come and see us in the North-West."
"By Christmas! It's a settled thing?" she said, holding up her forefinger with an odd, warning, alert gesture.
"It's a settled thing," he replied.
"Splendid!" she answered. "I believe you'll keep your word."
"You'll see I shall."
She rose. The horses, quieted down, were caught and saddled and brought round. She glanced from her blue-grey mare to his red stallion, and gave her odd, squirrel-like chuckle.
"What a contretemps," she said. "It's like the sun mating with the moon." She gave him a quick, bright, odd glance: some of the coolness of a fairy.
"Is it!" he exclaimed, as he lifted her into the saddle. She was slim and light, with an odd, remote reserve.
He mounted his horse.
"We go different ways for the moment," she said.
"Till Christmas," he answered. "Then the moon will come to the sun, eh? Bring the mare with you. Shell probably be in foal."
"I certainly will. Goodbye, till Christmas. Don't forget. I shall expect you to keep your word."
"I will keep my word," he said. "Goodbye till Christmas."
He rode away, laughing and chuckling to himself. If Mary had been a fiasco, this was a real joke. A real, unexpected joke.
His horse travelled with quick, strong, rhythmic movement, inland, away from the sea. At the last ridge he turned and saw the pale-blue ocean full of light. Then he rode over the crest and down the silent grey bush, in which he had once been lost.