He urged her to stay for lunch; he offered to have her fetched by the Sanatorium car; he begged to be allowed to accompany her back to Ashbury; but she stalwartly refused; and in a moment he and St. Maur were watching her, sprightly as a girl, tripping back along the dusty road to the station.
"My boy, my dear boy," he muttered to St. Maur, "that is what she felt, that is what she said. The unconscious voice in her knew the desired relationship and expressed the wish, although the conscious mind thought only of 'husband.'"
CHAPTER IX
"So inexhaustibly rich is the sun that even when it goes down it pours its gold into the very depths of the sea; and then even the poorest boatman rows with golden oars."
Thus spoke the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, and thus all generations of men have felt.
The warm rich colour, as of ripeness, that it gives to the youngest cheek, the tawny tinge as of jungle fauna with which it vitalises every dead-white urban hand, and the enchanting glamour it lends to the plainest head and face,—these are a few of the works of the sun that are surely a proof of its demoniacal glory. Halos, it is true, it fashions as well, and beyond reckoning; but the white teeth that flash from the tanned mask are scarcely those of a saint. Or has a saint actually been known who really had white teeth of his own?
August in England, between the moist wood-clad hills and the blinding glitter of the sea; August in a beautiful country homestead, with its flowering garden, its cool carpet of lawn stretching to a black line of thick hedgerow which seems to be the last barrier between earth and ocean,—what a season it is, and what a setting for the greatest game of youth, the game of catch as catch can, with a cheerless winter for the losers!
The world is at her old best, and all her children are exalted and exhilarated by the knowledge that they are at their best also. Even the trippers are perpetually in Sabbath clothes, as a sign that they are infected with the prevalent feeling of festivity.