She glanced at him askance: ‘Have you guessed my secret?’ and, putting her finger rosily to her lips, bade him stay where he was, and not attempt to follow her. And with that she vanished round the rock, leaving the boy standing as if stupefied.
Joan, sole child and heiress of the wealthy Knight! and he, a penniless dependent on a kinsman’s bounty! What would come of it? What could?
With a sigh he turned to the rock, and tracing on it in invisible characters the name Joan Medley, put his lips to it as if it were a face.
CHAPTER X.
CONFIDENCES
So began the idyll of a boy and girl. Their preliminary fencing with one another had been all a make-believe: they had been born to meet, and Fate had no real equivocations for them. Frank, affectionate, and without self-consciousness, the tie between them naturally formed itself into an innocent love-knot, and through it was transmitted a mutual confidence which asked no account of whys and wherefores.
The very next day, at the same hour, Brion returned to the glen, and climbed the hill to the hidden bower. Somehow he believed that he would find his lady ensconced there: and there he found her. She essayed only a brief pretence of surprise—and she was looking prettier than ever. He admired all the points in her which a man would have admired; but with better than a man’s eyes. The pink and white, the little tapering fingers and shapely arms, the cup of her throat, the soft provocation of her lips and rounded chin—they moved him not to the beatitude of passion but of reverence. If he had coveted to kiss anything of her, it would have been, holily and fearfully, her cheek.
‘You again?’ she said. She was seated exactly in her former posture.
‘Did you not expect me?’ asked Brion.
‘Think you I should have come here, an I had?’
‘I hope so: I believe so.’