Nobody has the heart to contradict him, though everybody knows that it
is a lie. Mrs. Huntley, at the first drop, has made for the coach, and
now sits in it, serene and dry. Algy follows her, with a chicken and a
champagne bottle. I sit doggedly still, where I am, on the cold moor.

Roger has not spoken to me since my rude reception of him on arriving,
but he now comes up to me.

"Had not you better follow her example?" he asks, speaking rather
formally, and looking toward the coach, where with smiling profile and
neat hair, my rival is sitting, reveling among the flesh-pots.

Something in the sight of her sleek, smooth tidiness, joined to the
consciousness of my own miserable, blowsed disorder, stings me more even
than the rain-drops are doing.

"Not I!" I answer, brusquely; "that is what I trust I shall never do!"

He passes by my sneer without notice.

"In this rain you will be drenched in two minutes."

"Apres!"

"_Apres!_" he repeats, impatiently, "_apres?_ you will catch your death
of cold!"

"And you will be a widower!" reply I, with a bitter smile.

Barbara is as obstinate as I am. She, too, seems to prefer the spite of
the elements to disturbing the _tete-a-tete_ in the coach. Musgrave has
made her as comfortable as he can, with her back against the poor little
Scotch fir, and a plaid over both their heads.

The feast proceeds in solemn silence. Even if we had the heart to talk,
the difficulty of making ourselves heard would quite check the
inclination.

There are little puddles in all our plates--the bread and cakes are
_pap_--the lamb is damp and flabby, and the _mayonnaise_ is reduced to a
sort of watery whey.

Mr. Parker is the only one who, under these circumstances, makes any
attempt to pretend that we are enjoying ourselves.

"This is not so bad, after all," he says, still with that same
unconquerable accent of joviality. He has to say it three times, and to
put up his hands to his mouth like a speaking-trumpet, before any one
hears him. When they do, "answer comes there none!"

I, indeed, am not in a position for conversation at the exact moment
that the demand is made upon me. I have just come to the end of a long
wrestle with my umbrella. It has at last got its wicked will, and has
turned right inside out! All its whalebones are aspiring heavenward. It
is transformed into a melancholy _cup_--like a great ugly flower, on a
bare stalk. I lay the remains calmly down beside me, and a