She moved along, her white dress floating softly over the green turf, its delicate flounces and knots of rosy ribbon looking like a trail of living flowers. Walden, walking at her side, nodded smilingly as he passed close by Cicely and Julian, his tall athletic figure contrasting well with Maryllia's fairy-like grace,--and presently, crossing from the lawn to what was called the 'Cherry- Tree Walk,' because the path led under an arched trellis work over which a couple of hundred cherry-trees were trained to form a long arbour or pergola, they turned down it, and drawing closer together in conversation, under the shower of white blossoms that shed fragrance above their heads, they disappeared. Cicely, struck by a certain picturesqueness, or what she would have called a 'stage effect' in the manner of their exit, stopped abruptly in the pianissimo humming of a tune with which she declared she had been suddenly inspired by some lines Adderley had just recited.
"Isn't she pretty!" she said, indicating with a jerk of her ever gesticulating hand the last luminous glimmer of Maryllia's vanishing gown--"She's like Titania,--or Kilmeny in Fairyland. Why don't you write something about HER, instead of about some girl you 'imagine' and never see?"
Adderley, lying at his ease on the grass, turned on his arm and likewise looked after the two figures that had just passed, as it seemed, into a paradise of snowy flowers.
"The girls I 'imagine' are always so much better than those I see,"- -he replied, with uncomplimentary candour.
"Thank you!" said Cicely--"You are quite rude, you know! But it doesn't matter."
He stared up at her in vague astonishment.
"Oh, I didn't mean you!" he explained--"You're not a girl."
"No, really!" ejaculated Cicely--"Then what am I, pray?"
He looked at her critically,--at her thin sallow little face with the intense eyes burning like flame under her well-marked black eyebrows,--at her drooping angular arms and unformed figure, tapering into the scraggy, long black-stockinged legs which ended in a pair of large buckled shoes that covered feet of a decidedly flat- iron model,--then he smiled oddly.
"You are a goblin!"--he said--"An elf,--a pixie--a witch! You were born in a dark cave where the sea dashed in at high tide and made the rough stones roar with music. There were sea-gulls nesting above your cradle, and when the wind howled, and you cried, they called to you wildly in such a plaintive way that you stopped your tears to listen to them, and to watch their white wings circling round you! You are not a girl--no!--how can you be? For when you grew a little older, the invisible people of the air took you away into a great forest, and taught you to swing yourself on the boughs of the trees, while the stars twinkled at you through the thick green leaves,--and you heard the thrushes sing at morning and the nightingales at evening, till at last you learned the trill and warble and the little caught sob in the throat which almost breaks the heart of those who listen to it? And so you have become what you are, and what I say you always will be--a goblin--a witch!--not a girl, but a genius!"