“No, of course you don’t. But I mean the emotion is irresistible, ‘the desire of the moth for the star,’ that sort of thing, you know, and I immolate myself, the happy victim of your attractions.”
“All that has been said before.” Orianda adjusted her parasol as a screen for her raillery.
“I swear,” said he, “I have not said it before, never to a living soul.”
Fountains of amusement beamed in her brilliant eyes. She was exquisite; he was no longer in doubt about the colour of her eyes—though he could not describe them. And the precise shade of her hair was—well, it was extraordinarily beautiful.
“I mean—it’s been said to me!”
“O damnation! Of course it’s been said to you. Ah, and isn’t that my complete justification? But you agree, do you not? Tell me if it’s possible. Say you agree, and let me take you back to your father.”
“I think I would like you to,” the jolly girl said, slowly.
II
On an August morning a few weeks later they travelled down together to see her father. In the interim Orianda had resigned her appointment, and several times Gerald had met her secretly in the purlieus of Tillington Park. The girl’s cool casual nature fascinated him not less than her appearance. Admiration certainly outdistanced his happiness, although that also increased; but the bliss had its shadow, for the outcome of their friendship seemed mysteriously to depend on the outcome of the proposed return to her father’s home, devotion to that project forming the first principle, as it were, of their intercourse. Orianda had not dangled before him the prospect of any serener relationship; she took his caresses as naturally and undemonstratively as a pet bird takes a piece of sugar. But he had begun to be aware of a certain force behind all her charming naivete; the beauty that exhaled the freshness, the apparent fragility, of a drop of dew had none the less a savour of tyranny which he vowed should never, least of all by him, be pressed to vulgar exercise.
When the train reached its destination Orianda confided calmly that she had preferred not to write to her father. Really she did not know for certain whether he was alive or even living on at the old home she so loved. And there was a journey of three miles or more which Orianda proposed to walk. So they walked.