The boat was gliding out on the receding tide. It slid before the Lime Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis’s little house, and passed across the turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the boat; but still the figure in the summerhouse did not move.
He turned and walked up the hill.
“I’m sorry you didn’t find Ellen—I should have liked to see her again,” May said as they drove home through the dusk. “But perhaps she wouldn’t have cared—she seems so changed.”
“Changed?” echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on the ponies’ twitching ears.
“So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her house, and spending her time with such queer people. Fancy how hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers’! She says she does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying dreadful people. But I sometimes think we’ve always bored her.”
Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice: “After all, I wonder if she wouldn’t be happier with her husband.”
He burst into a laugh. “ Sancta simplicitas! ” he exclaimed; and as she turned a puzzled frown on him he added: “I don’t think I ever heard you say a cruel thing before.”
“Cruel?”
“Well—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don’t think people happier in hell.”