I do not think he was very wildly in love with Miss Courteen, but I do believe he was sincerely vexed with himself for letting her fall into Vernon's power. For a moment he seriously pondered the wisdom of warning her mother of the lengths to which the affair had gone, but upon reflection shrank from a step which would savour, in the eyes of the world, of ill-bred intrusion. After all, the girl was nothing to him, and her reputation—plague on her reputation! I trust you observe the unheroick aftermath of heroick Burgundy. Such bathos of indifference would have sounded strange in the days preceding this forenoon.
Just then my lady Bunbutter went by in her capacious chair and Charles prepared to make an elaborate bow, but her ladyship merely stared at him in cold disdain, and he was forced to buckle his shoe to save his countenance.
"So everybody knows," said Charles to himself, "Well! I shall always regard Curtain Wells with affection and remember it with regret."
He walked down the Colonnade where Miss Morton lived and, as he passed the house, thought with half a smile of Valentine Day. It seemed a century ago—that merry morning. Soon he was in the fields, where the hedges were splashed with the silver of blackthorn in profuse bloom.
He crossed a winding path, begun and ended with a notched and scrabbled kissing-gate, and, passing through a small plantation where the daffodils grew tall, went up a rounded hillside along whose clear-cut horizon great fleecy clouds moved solemnly. He stopped for a moment to glance back at Curtain Wells with the March sun spangling the rain-wet roofs before he dipped with a sigh into one of those serene valleys that are only found in England—valleys whose slopes are often darkened by the long shadows of sheep and cattle, whose hollows are bright with moist grass and in summer fragrant with spearmint and creamy meadowsweet.
He took the devious course of a narrow stream and knew the grave delights of rural meditation; yet somehow the image of Phyllida danced before him all the time and whenever he paused, the wind far away over the hillside had a melancholy and foreboding sound.
He met an elderly gentleman—a parson by the colour of his cloth—who was poking some decayed herbage with a long cane. The elderly gentleman looked up as Charles went by, gave him a 'very good morning,' and said he believed he had seen an adder enter the herbage.
"Indeed," said Charles, who thought the information given demanded an attitude of respectful surprize.
"But nothing amazes me after that wonderful February. When I tell you that half an hour ago I saw an Orange Tip butterfly, you will understand that nothing amazes me."
Charles left the Elderly Gentleman still investigating the decayed herbage reputed to contain an adder, and found himself envying a mind that could invest a day with such easy fame. He had seen an Orange Tip butterfly. Had he met grey-eyed Athene, or beheld the roses and doves of Cytherea, the day would scarcely have held a more splendid memory.