"It's most remarkable," said the puzzled man in this instance.
"What is?" asked the enigma promptly.
To avoid an argument which he could not sustain, Archie switched his on
to the weather.
"This day in September; one could well believe that it is still the
month of roses."
"What! With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped fields and
golden haystacks, and--and--"
She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of
contradiction.
"I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!"
"Misplaced?"
"July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of this
autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly couple who feel
too late the supreme passion."
Lucy's eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine,
revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted her
comprehension.
"I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom."
"And old age its experience. The law of compensation, my dearest. But I
don't see," he added reflectively, "what your remark and my answer have
to do with the view," whereat Lucy declared that his wits wandered.
Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane where
the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast open space,
apparently at the World's-End. Here the saltings spread raggedly towards
the stately stream of the Thames, intersected by dykes and ditches,
by earthen ramparts, crooked fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of
stunted trees following the water-courses. The marshes were shaggy with
reeds and rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here
and there gleamed emerald-hued patches of water-soaked soil, fit for
fairy-rings. Beyond a moderately high embankment of turf and timber, the
lovers could see the broad river, sweeping eastward to the Nore, with
homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat on its golden tide.
Across the gleaming waters, from where they lipped their banks to the
foot of low domestic Kentish hills, stretched alluvial lands, sparsely
timbered, and in the clear sunshine clusters of houses, great and small,
factories with tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway
lines could be discerned. The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of
the sun's profuse gildings, but to the lovers it appeared a Paradise.
Cupid, lord of gods and men, had bestowed on them the usual rose-colored
spectacles which form an important part of his stock-in-trade, and they
looked abroad on a fairy world. Was not SHE there: was not HE there:
could Romeo or Juliet desire more?