“If you had started a little earlier,” Felicia said, smiling, “and met me on the hill-side, I shouldn’t have been so in harmony. There the pine-woods are very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been incongruous.”
“Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual,” he returned; “there would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I may tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in the shadow and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite bewilderingly radiant and charming?”
Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say it, so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed as inevitable as the bird’s song. She could hardly feel that his rights were only those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he would like, and a person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So, if he would, he might say that she was like a Watteau and had made a picture. She had experienced, for her part, something of the same sensation. Maurice had been a radiant and delightful apparition.
He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made. Hair, small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink and white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had not their blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy, his smile, claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response and understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of sparkling emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He was so much an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to have walked with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale—into a veritable Watteau landscape, at all events, where happiness was the only natural thing in the world.
As they approached the lodge-gates—they had been talking without pause of music, books, pictures, even about life—he asked her how she had guessed that he was Maurice Wynne—“Because there is only one of you—but there are several of us—Mrs. Merrick’s guests, I mean.”
“She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one of them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the other.”
“Poor Geoffrey!” Maurice ejaculated with a laugh, “how you have guessed at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is a tremendous friend of mine.”
“Is he? I hope you don’t mind my flippancy; it was founded on the merest scrap of conjecture.”
“It isn’t flippancy; it’s intuition. Geoffrey is that, only he is more. I don’t mind a bit—I wouldn’t mind flippancy, only I feel bound to testify. Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been since our boyhood.” His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of character than his charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool approval to the stately friend.
“I suppose you have heard about the others, too,” Maurice went on; “Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will strike you. You must tell me—even if it’s flippant. She is clever, too; at all events, she is very effective.”