" He held out both hands and took hers in his.
For a moment Mrs. Horncastle was speechless and vacillating. She had
often noticed before that it was part of the irony of the creation of
such a simple nature as Barker's that he was not only open to deceit,
but absolutely seemed to invite it. Instead of making others franker,
people were inclined to rebuke his credulity by restraint and
equivocation on their own part. But the evasion thus offered to her,
although only temporary, was a temptation she could not resist. And it
prolonged an interview that a ruthless revelation of the truth might
have shortened.
"She did not tell me she was going there," she replied still evasively;
"and, indeed," she added, with a burst of candor still more dangerous,
"I only learned it from the hotel clerk after she was gone. But I want
to talk to you about her relations to Van Loo," she said, with a return
of her former intensity of gaze, "and I thought we would be less subject
to interruption here than at the hotel. Only I suppose everybody knows
this place, and any of those flirting couples are likely to come here.
Besides," she added, with a little half-hysterical laugh and a slight
shiver, as she looked up at the high interlacing boughs above her head,
"it's as public as the aisles of a church, and really one feels as if
one were 'speaking out' in meeting. Isn't there some other spot a little
more secluded, where we could sit down," she went on, as she poked her
parasol into the usual black gunpowdery deposit of earth which mingled
with the carpet of pine-needles beneath her feet, "and not get all
sticky and dirty?"
Barker's eyes sparkled.
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