y-four hours.

He resumed his chair on the veranda, and sighed. It was late afternoon,
and he was lonely. After the interest and excitement of the preceding
day and night, to-day seemed very dull and uneventful; it had been, in
truth, nothing less than stupid--a mere routine of meals and pipes
interrupted by no communication from the outer world more blood-stirring
than the daily calls of the village grocer and butcher. Ember had not
telephoned, as Whitaker had hoped he would; and the chatelaine of the
neighbouring cottage had not manifested any interest whatever in the
well-being of the damaged amateur squire of dames.

Whitaker felt himself neglected and abused. He inclined to sulks. The
loveliness of a day of unbroken calm offered him no consolation.
Solitude in a lonely lodge is all very well, if one cares for that sort
of thing; but it takes two properly to appreciate the beauties of the
wilderness.

The trouble with him was (he began to realize) that he had lived too
long a hermit. For six years he had been practically isolated and cut
off from the better half of existence; femininity had formed no factor
in his cosmos. Even since his return to America his associations had
been almost exclusively confined to the wives and daughters of old
friends, the former favouring him only with a calm maternal patronage,
the daughters obviously regarding him as a sort of human curio old
enough to be entitled to a certain amount of respectful consideration,
but not to be taken seriously--"like a mummy," Whitaker told himself,
not without sympathy for the view-point of the younger generation.

But now, of a sudden, he had been granted a flash of insight into the
true significance of companionship between a man and a woman who had
something in common aside from community in their generation. Not two
hours altogether of such intercourse had been his, but it had been
enough to infuse all his consciousness with a vague but irking
discontent. He wanted more, and wanted it ardently; and what Whitaker
desired he generally set himself to gain with a single-hearted
earnestness of purpose calculated to compass the end in view with the
least possible waste of time.

In this instance, however, he was handicapped to exasperation by that
confounded ankle!

Besides, he couldn't in decency pursue the woman; she was entitled to a
certain amount of privacy, of freedom from his attentions.

Furthermore, he had no right as yet to offer her