“Well, but I hope I don’t look as if I ‘made up’ my mouth!”
“Why, you don’t make it up, do you?”
“Of course not,” said I. And then I turned from looking at the painted figure to the other deeper, tenderer colour of the sea washing a strip of sand below the cliff.
“Oh, it is lovely here,” I sighed, revelling in the beauty of that and the sky. “Did you ever see anything so blue as it is to-day?”
“Or so golden?” added Billy, nodding towards the hassocks of gorse in full bloom. “I’ve never seen it like this before. D’you know that there’s a Welsh proverb that calls this county ‘the land of thriftless gold’? Rather pretty, isn’t it? It must have been wonderful here in the spring; this is the second crop, you know. A man I know once told me that it was like falling in love.”
“How d’you mean?” I asked, as he stopped. “Aren’t you going to paint the wing in her hat while you’ve that brush full of black paint?”
“Presently.—Oh, yes, about that gorse. He said the first blooming was more showy—more fuss made over it—first love, you know, and all that; but that it was nothing like as sweet as the later time. Should you agree with him, d’you think?”
“How should I know?” I retorted rather flippantly, to hide my intense surprise that Billy should possess—let alone quote!—a friend who sounded so utterly unlike himself. “You might know me well enough by this time to see I’m not that sort of girl!”
“Which sort of girl? The kind who doesn’t fall in love a second time?”