“I wouldn’t have you otherwise for all the world,” replied he, tenderly; and they started on their quest. Swinging himself over the ledge he filled the little vessel from the trickle of water in the gully, and was with her again in a minute.
“Now,” he went on, arranging a large flat stone as a seat for her, just in the shade of the cavern’s month. “Now, you must make the most of the time, and knock up an adequate representation of the scene, and I believe I shall have the cheek to ask you to copy it again for me,” and he threw himself down on the rock beside her.
“Don’t sit there in the sun,” said she. “And I shall tire you out, keeping you tied here by the hour. It would be much more amusing to you to be away with the others.”
Claverton indulged in a long, quiet laugh. “That idea strikes me as something too rich. Tire me out! When I have been longing the whole day to be with you, and with you only and alone. When I could sit here for ever and ever only to be by your side and to see you and to hear the music of your voice, darling. I never want a better heaven than this—than this one—here, at this moment,” he went on, with a burst of passionate abandonment as different from his ordinary self-control of speech as the beautiful scene before them was from a Lincolnshire fen.
Lilian made no reply, but bent her head rather lower over her drawing, and her fingers trembled ever so slightly. Clouds of spreuws flitted among the crags opposite, their shrill whistle echoing melodiously from rock to rock. Bright-eyed little conies sat up peering warily around for a moment, and then scampering into their holes among the stones and ledges; and a large bird of prey circled slowly overhead uttering a loud rasping cry, then soared away over the valley. Beneath, the forest lay sleeping in the lustrous sunlight, and now and again from its cool recess would be upborne the soft note of a hoopoe.
Lilian worked on, neither of them speaking much. Claverton, for his part, was content to lounge there, as he had said, for ever, so that only he might watch that graceful white figure—bending over the sketch-block—and the delicate patrician profile, the fringed eyelid opening wide as she kept looking up from the paper to take in the scene. The sound of his own voice had a tendency to break the charm, so he kept silence. And thus the time wore on, till at last the sketch was finished, and Lilian, laying down the block to dry, rose to her feet.
“There,” she said; “I think we must be going.”
Her companion’s countenance fell. “Not yet. Look. You haven’t filled in that tuft of aloes on the krantz, and there’s more shading wanted here.”
She laughed. “I can fill that in at home. And the shading’s quite right, really. Do you know how long we have been here?”
“I know how long we haven’t been here—half long enough.”