“I had to then, worse luck,” he laughed. “But I managed it somehow.” Then they both laughed—easily, happily.
Denham, looking down at her as she sat there, came to the conclusion that she was more charming than ever. The sheen of her abundant brown hair, carelessly but becomingly coiled, the dark semicircle of the eyelashes on the cheek, the strong, supple figure so splendidly outlined, the movement of the shapely arms as she kneaded the dough—why, this homely performance was a poem in itself. Then the staging—the fall of wooded slope to a deep down vista of plain below—dim in the noontide haze where on the right a darker line in contrast to the open green showed part of the great mysterious forest tract. Even the utterly unaesthetic dwelling-house hardly seemed to spoil the picture.
“Well, and what is the subject of all this profound thought?” she asked suddenly, with a quick, bright, upward glance.
He started, looked at her straight, and told her. Yet, somehow, he did it in such a way as to avoid banality, possibly because so naturally.
“What did I tell you once before?” she said, but she changed colour ever so slightly. “That you must not pay me compliments. They don’t come well from you—I mean they are too petty.”
It might have been his turn to answer with a “tu quoque.” But he did not. What he said was—
“I was answering your question. I was describing the picture I had seen in my own mind. How could I have left out the principal figure in it?”
Again she glanced up at him, was about to speak, then seemed to change her mind. If her personality had struck Denham as unique, the very same thing seemed to have struck her as regarded himself. The intellectual face, the tall, fine frame, the easy, cultured manner, half-a-score other things about him—all these rendered him a personality clean outside her own experience. Whereby it will be seen that the atmosphere around Ben Halse’s remote and primitive dwelling was, even at this early stage, charged with abundant potentialities.
“And ‘the principal figure’ in it is all floury and generally dishevelled,” she said at last, with a light laugh.
“That makes the charm of the study.”