She vanished upstairs, and Helston Varne, left momentarily alone, was conscious of a mixed train of thought. First of all was the certainty of a very delightful day before him: then, as he sat opposite the creeper-shaded window, his glance fell upon the couch which stood beneath it. There, then, was where the stranger had been found dead. Instinctively he rose from his seat and went over to the couch. It was the first time he had been alone in the room, and now his professional instincts moved him in that direction. Yet there was nothing on earth to reward them in the aspect of this very plain and innocent looking article of furniture. He looked at it long and earnestly—up and down, but no. It suggested nothing. Then the sound of Melian’s footsteps, coming down the stairs recalled him to the ordinary ways of life, and he simply stood where he was—looking out of the window.
“Which way shall we go?” she said. “I know. We’ll go up through Broceliande and out on to the heath, then we’ll wander round the wood on the other side, and down again by the head of Plane Pond.”
“Anywhere you like,” he said. “And your programme sounds delightful.”
Chapter Twenty One.
The Disused Room.
If ever a country ramble was a success, a grand success, that one was. In the gnarled oak-wood dim in cool gloom, comparative, as regarded the flood of sunshine outside, the girl would let imagination run riot, and as she rattled on—fitting this and that vista into the scenes of her favourite romance—her companion listened, enjoying the extraordinary naturalness of her. And he entered into it all, adding here and there an apposite suggestion, which thoroughly appealed. Then, too, when they got out upon open heathland, though the time of its crimsoning had not yet come—and a wide sweep of rolling valley, and dark belts of firwoods contrasting with the brighter, richer green of oak, she would point him out this or that old church tower in the distance, and expatiate upon the archaeological treasures contained within the same, and her wide eyes would go bright with love of her subject, and her cheeks glow with the soft sun-kiss and the bracing upland air—even her words would trip each other up in her anxiety to get out a description. And then Helston Varne would decide to himself that it was just as well he was strong-headed beyond the ordinary, for anything approaching the perfect charm of this girl at his side, he, with a large and varied experience of every conceivable shade and phase of life, had certainly never encountered.
She was so natural, so intensely and confidingly natural—and therein lay a large measure of her charm. There was not a grain of self-consciousness about her, and she talked to him throughout as though she had known him all her life. It was not often he had struck anything approaching such an experience. So the morning wore on—fled, rather—all too quickly for him at any rate; for he was enjoying this experience as he could not quite remember ever having enjoyed an experience before.
They were near home now, threading a narrow keeper’s path, through the thick covert. Once she laid a light hand on his sleeve to stop him, as a cuckoo suddenly gurgled forth his joyous call right overhead, so near, in fact, as to be almost startling.