"More misery! More unhappiness!" he said to himself. Really if life at
Riseholme was to become a series of agitated days ending in devastating
discoveries, the sooner he went away with Foljambe and Dicky the
better. He did not quite know what it was like to be in love, for the
nearest he had previously ever got to it was when he saw Olga awake on
the mountain-top and felt that he had missed his vocation in not being
Siegfried, but from that he guessed. This time, too, it was about Olga,
not about her as framed in the romance of legend and song, but of her
as she appeared at Riseholme, taking as she did now, an ecstatic
interest in the affairs of the place. So short a time ago, when she
contemplated coming here first, she had spoken of it as a lazy
backwater. Now she knew better than that, for she could listen to Mrs
Weston far longer than anybody else, and ask for more histories when
even she had run dry. And yet Lucia seemed hardly to interest her at
all. Georgie wondered why that was.
He raised his eyes as he muttered these desolated syllables and there
was Olga just letting herself out of the front garden of the Old Place.
Georgie's first impulse was to affect not to see her, and turn into his
bachelor house, but she had certainly seen him, and made so shrill and
piercing a whistle on her fingers that, pretend as he would not to have
seen her, it was ludicrous to appear not to have heard her.
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