"Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon!" she cried, jumping

from her seat (with just a glance at the glass) and strolling out

bareheaded into the cottage garden. "Isn't this a charming place?

Only look at our hollyhocks! Consider what an oasis after six

months of London!"

She seemed even prettier than last night, in her simple white

morning dress, a mere ordinary English gown, without affectation of

any sort, yet touched with some faint reminiscence of a flowing

Greek chiton. Its half-classical drapery exactly suited the severe

regularity of her pensive features and her graceful figure. Alan

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thought as he looked at her he had never before seen anybody who

appeared at all points so nearly to approach his ideal of

womanhood. She was at once so high in type, so serene, so

tranquil, and yet so purely womanly.

"Yes, it IS a lovely place," he answered, looking around at the

clematis that drooped from the gable-ends. "I'm staying myself

with the Watertons at the Park, but I'd rather have this pretty

little rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italian

terraces. The cottagers have chosen the better part. What

gillyflowers and what columbines! And here you look out so

directly on the common. I love the gorse and the bracken, I love

the stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug hard at the

silverweed, they make it all seem so deliciously English."

"Shall we walk to the ridge?" Herminia asked with a sudden burst of

suggestion. "It's too rare a day to waste a minute of it indoors.

I was waiting till you came. We can talk all the freer for the

fresh air on the hill-top."

Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick better, and he said so at

once. Herminia disappeared for a moment to get her hat. Alan

observed almost without observing it that she was gone but for a

second. She asked none of that long interval that most women

require for the simplest matter of toilet. She was back again

almost instantly, bright and fresh and smiling, in the most modest

of hats, set so artlessly on her head that it became her better

than all art could have made it. Then they started for a long

stroll across the breezy common, yellow in places with upright

spikes of small summer furze, and pink with wild pea-blossom. Bees

buzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang shrill

from the sand-banks. Herminia's light foot tripped over the spongy

turf. By the top of the furthest ridge, looking down on North

Holmwood church, they sat side by side for a while on the close

short grass, brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the cropped

sward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs stretching

away towards Reigate. Tender grays and greens melted into one

another on the larches hard by; Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy

white in the middle distance. They had been talking earnestly all

the way, like two old friends together; for they were both of them

young, and they felt at once that nameless bond which often draws

one closer to a new acquaintance at first sight than years of

converse. "How seriously you look at life," Alan cried at last, in

answer to one of Herminias graver thoughts. "I wonder what makes

you take it so much more earnestly than all other women?"




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