“A mosquito! Keep still!” She clapped her hands together over an imaginary insect. “They’re beginning to bite. You’ve been asleep. Oh, look!”
A rabbit, startled by the sudden noise, was scuttering into its hole, fatly, with a flicker of white tail.
Laura laughed.
“The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh, my dear paws! Oh, my fur and whiskers! Did you ever see such a drunken lollop? He was tipsy with sunshine, Justin. You know, it’s most dissipated for a rabbit to be out at this hour. He ought to be in bed.” She stretched out lazy arms. “Oh—isn’t it hot? How you can stand the sun pouring down on you like that! Come into the shade, Justin—what there is of it, at least.”
She moved a little, leaving him half the ragged patch of shadow from the sloe-bush under which she sat. She loved woods and shadow and cool, as Justin loved heat and sunshine and open spaces; but unless she had owned, as she would not do, to her one vanity, her delicate skin, she was never allowed more than a sloe-bush for shelter.
But today Justin was ready to agree that the sun might be too hot even for him. He dragged himself into the shade and sat beside her, pulling idly at the yellow heads of hawksbit that shone like midget suns in the cropped grass, while he stared out over the wide country that ran down from the bare hot chalk slope into the green valley land, and up again to hill-tops pale as the sky.
“Not bad,” he drawled at last, “not half bad! Do you know anything like it?”
Laura pronounced judgment.
“I don’t believe I’m biassed. The Alps—were the Alps. And I loved the Rhone—and I’ve seen Italy—and I’ve heard Oliver talk about Greece. But all of them—all Europe—is only a setting for England—and England’s only a setting for Kent—and Kent’s only a setting for Brackenhurst. I believe I love Brackenhurst as if it were a person. How I shall ever leave I don’t know!”
“Leave it! Leave it! How d’you mean, leave it?” He was irritated. He always disliked even a hint of change: it implied discomfort. He shrank in angry boredom from spring-cleaning, and death, and new acquaintances.