Chapter 2 - Page 2

in women, she
didn't try to conceal from herself the fact that she on her side
was by no means without interest in the question how soon he would
pay her his promised visit. As he appeared at the rustic gate in
the privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed color with
pleasure when she saw him push it open.

"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
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.