"Did you keep the puma's skin?" asked Anthony, who had followed the story with breathless interest.
"No, I'd have liked to, but the lumbermen had dragged the thing outside, and the coyotes got hold of it in the night, so there wasn't much skin left by morning."
"I think you were immensely plucky!" exclaimed Avelyn warmly.
"Plucky! What else could I have done? I tell you, I felt the biggest coward out!"
CHAPTER XVII
The Lavender Lady
It was Easter time when the Lavender Lady first rose upon the horizon of Lyngates. She came with the dog violets and the ground ivy and the meadow orchises, and several other lovely purple things, at least that was how her advent was always associated in Avelyn's mind. She took the furnished bungalow near the church, lately vacated by the curate, and it was rumoured in the village that she composed music and had published poetry, and that she had come down into the country for a rest.
When Avelyn first saw her she was sitting in the flowery little garden raised above the road. She wore a soft lavender dress and an old lace fichu, and she had dark eyes and eyebrows, and cheeks as pink as the China roses, and fluffy grey-white hair that gleamed like a dove's wing as the sun shone on it. She looked such a picture as she sat there, all unconscious of spectators, against a background of golden wallflowers and violet aubrietias, that Avelyn was obliged just to stand still and gaze. In that thirty seconds she fell in love with the Lavender Lady. It was not a mere mild liking, but a sudden, romantic, absolute, headlong falling in love. It had come all in a minute and overwhelmed her. She crept away softly to dream dreams about the vision she had seen in the garden. At home there were some beautiful illustrated editions of William Morris's Earthly Paradise and of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems. She took them out and pored over them. The gorgeous pre-Raphaelite pictures had always appealed to her innate artistic sense, and set her nerves athrill with a something she could not analyse. There was not one of them so beautiful as her Lavender Lady among the flowers.
"She's a little like 'The Blessed Damozel', who leaned out 'from the gold bar of heaven'," mused Avelyn. "And then again she's like Gainsborough's picture of 'The Duchess of Devonshire'. I wonder what her name is, and if I shall ever know her? I don't believe I'd dare to speak to her. I'd be too shy."
For a whole week Avelyn, terribly in love, lived in a mystic world in which the Lavender Lady, robed in the glory of the purple night and stars, was as the central sun, and she herself revolved like a planet round her orbit. The family could not understand why she insisted upon choosing heliotrope for her new dress.