“They got that hay rather damp,” he said. “Can’t you smell it—like hot tobacco and sandal-wood?”
“What, is that the stack?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s always like that when it’s picked damp.”
The conversation was restarted, but did not flourish. When they turned on to a narrow path by the side of the field he went ahead. Leaning over the hedge, he pulled three sprigs of honeysuckle, yellow as butter, full of scent; then he waited for her. She was hanging her head, looking in the hedge-bottom. He presented her with the flowers without speaking. She bent forward, inhaled the rich fragrance, and looked up at him over the blossoms with her beautiful, beseeching blue eyes. He smiled gently to her.
“Isn’t it nice?” he said. “Aren’t they fine bits?”
She took them without answering, and put one piece carefully in her dress. It was quite against her rule to wear a flower. He took his place by her side.
“I always like the gold-green of cut fields,” he said. “They seem to give off sunshine even when the sky’s greyer than a tabby cat.”
She laughed, instinctively putting out her hand towards the glowing field on her right.
They entered the larch-wood. There the chill wind was changed into sound. Like a restless insect he hovered about her, like a butterfly whose antennae flicker and twitch sensitively as they gather intelligence, touching the aura, as it were, of the female. He was exceedingly delicate in his handling of her.
The path was cut windingly through the lofty, dark, and closely serried trees, which vibrated like chords under the soft bow of the wind. Now and again he would look down passages between the trees—narrow pillared corridors, dusky as if webbed across with mist. All round was a twilight, thickly populous with slender, silent trunks. Helena stood still, gazing up at the tree-tops where the bow of the wind was drawn, causing slight, perceptible quivering. Byrne walked on without her. At a bend in the path he stood, with his hand on the roundness of a larch-trunk, looking back at her, a blue fleck in the brownness of congregated trees. She moved very slowly down the path.