They lunched somewhere—neither of them could ever remember where—on very tough cold ham and insufficiently cooled beer, but they were both too happy to mind, or even to observe the faults of the menu. And as neither of them had ever before set eyes on the Heath, it was full of surprises, as well as of beauties. Yielding to some unexplained instinct, they both took off their hats (what is it that induces people to uncover their heads in high places?), and the warm sun shone down on their hair.
"Your hair must be very long, Brigitte?" observed Joyselle once, as he looked at her silky plaits that covered her crown in disregard of the laws of fashion.
"It is. Comes to my knees. Oh, look!"
Two people, a man and a girl, sat in the shade of an isolated tree only a few yards below the place where they stood. They were evidently enjoying an unlawful holiday, for they were workers—factory hands, probably, and they were as palpably rejoicing in their freedom.
The girl, whose brilliant red hair was pulled out at the sides until her head was as big as a bushel basket, wore a pink blouse and a green skirt. The youth, stunted and pale, was gorgeous only as to tie, but quite evidently she considered him her complement. For they were busy drinking beer from a bottle, turn about, and kissing each other delightedly between swallows. Joyselle started, drawing a deep breath, and Brigit, without moving her head, looked at him sideways, as the so-called Fornarina looks in the Uffizi, in Florence.
"They are cheery, aren't they?" she asked hastily, and he, nodding, turned away. For a few moments he was silent, and then he began to talk rather loudly about nothing in particular, and in a few moments was himself—the Joyselle of that particular day. Brigit realised that their stronghold of reserves and lies had been dangerously threatened by his mounting emotion. If he had broken down in his rôle—and she knew that the playing of any kind of a rôle was foreign to his nature, and therefore perilous—she would have lost him.
His mind, of course, except in certain moments when it all unconsciously was subjugated by her will, was a closed book to her.
For he was not only a man (and no woman can ever wholly understand any man's mind), but he was nearly twenty years older than she, and he was a Norman—a race very complicated, in its mixture of shrewd cunning and simplicity, and difficult for even other French people to comprehend. But groping in the dark though she was, the girl had grasped two essential facts: if Joyselle learned that she loved him, he would go away if it killed him; and if, though remaining in ignorance of her love, he was led to betray his, the result would be the same.
So her aim must be to keep him well under his own control, and to avoid betraying her personal feelings in the very least degree.
It was easy that first day. He was still more or less dazed and taken up with his discovery that he loved her, and therefore not so shrewd as usual. The future, she knew, would be harder.