He was not going. He would stay; she should continue to see him, and the world was full of joy. "Heavens, how I can lie," she whispered softly, "and now we shall both have to lie. We both know about him; he thinks I don't know; and he doesn't know about me! It is a comedy. Oh, Victor, Victor, Victor!"
He came out a moment later, seeming to fill the world with his giant bulk and his astounding radiation of joy. Two narrow-chested city clerks stood still to stare at him, their pallid little faces blank with amazement. A red-nosed flower-girl thrust a great bunch of yellow roses up at him with certainty of sale written all over her. "Roses? Of course. How much?"
He laughed aloud as he gave her some money and then got into the hansom.
"Hampstead Heath, cabby. At Falaise there are millions of these roses—see, with the outside leaves wrinkled and red. Oh, Brigit, Brigit, what a day!"
CHAPTER TEN
If it be true that everything is in the eye of the beholder, then Joyselle's and Brigit Mead's eyes must have been full of beauties that day.
For to them Hampstead Heath was the most marvellously lovely place on earth.
His light-heartedness, chiefly due to his faculty for ignoring side-issues and enjoying the present, was of course magnified as well by the fact that it followed close on the heels of one of his despairing black fits. Yesterday he had been, because of an unsatisfactory morning's work in Chelsea, in the very depths, honestly despising himself as an artist, sincerely loathing his incorrigible love of amusement and consequent wasting of time.
So this sunny, rather windy morning, Brigit by his side, and his newly awakened conscience stilled for the moment, was to him as near Paradise as anything he could imagine.