death. "And cool as a cucumber too," said Cothope, turning it over in his mind as he told me.
("They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite to lose 'em," said Cothope, generalizing about the sex.)
Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The question was whether I should be taken to the house her step-mother occupied at Bedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house, or down to Carnaby's place at Easting. Beatrice had no doubt in the matter, for she meant to nurse me. Carnaby didn't seem to want that to happen. "She would have it wasn't half so far," said Cothope. "She faced us out. . . .
"I hate to be faced out of my opinions, so I've taken a pedometer over it since. It's exactly forty-three yards further.
"Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight," said Cothope, finishing the picture; "and then he gave in."
§5
But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting had developed in many directions. She came and went, moving in an orbit for which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales and Northampton, while her step-mother on some independent system of her own also vanished and recurred intermittently. At home they obeyed the rule of an inflexible old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercised all the rights of proprietorship in Carnaby's extensive stables. Her interest in me was from the first undisguised. She found her way to my work sheds and developed rapidly, in spite of the sincere
