“Oh, dear,” she laughed, with a little mowe, “Freddy is such an ass, and Louie Denys is like a wasp at treacle. I wanted to laugh, yet I felt just a tiny bit cross. Don’t you feel great when you go mowing like that? Father Timey sort of feeling? Shall we go and look! We’ll say we want those foxgloves he’ll be cutting down directly—and those bell flowers. I suppose you needn’t go on with your labours——”
He did not know we were approaching till I called him, then he started slightly as he saw the tall, proud girl.
“Mr. Saxton—Miss D’Arcy,” I said, and he shook hands with her. Immediately his manner became ironic, for he had seen his hand big and coarse and inflamed with the snaith clasping the lady’s hand.
“We thought you looked so fine,” she said to him, “and men are so embarrassing when they make love to somebody else—aren’t they? Save us those foxgloves, will you—they are splendid—like savage soldiers drawn up against the hedge—don’t cut them down—and those campanulas—bell-flowers, ah, yes! They are spinning idylls up there. I don’t care for idylls, do you? Oh, you don’t know what a classical pastoral person you are—but there, I don’t suppose you suffer from idyllic love——” she laughed, “—one doesn’t see the silly little god fluttering about in our hayfields, does one? Do you find much time to sport with Amaryllis in the shade?—I’m sure it’s a shame they banished Phyllis from the fields——”
He laughed and went on with his work. She smiled a little, too, thinking she had made a great impression. She put out her hand with a dramatic gesture, and looked at me, when the scythe crunched through the meadow-sweet.
“Crunch! isn’t it fine!” she exclaimed, “a kind of inevitable fate—I think it’s fine!”
We wandered about picking flowers and talking until teatime. A manservant came with the tea-basket, and the girls spread the cloth under a great willow tree. Lettie took the little silver kettle, and went to fill it at the small spring which trickled into a stone trough all pretty with cranesbill and stellaria hanging over, while long blades of grass waved in the water. George, who had finished his work, and wanted to go home to tea, walked across to the spring where Lettie sat playing with the water, getting little cupfuls to put into the kettle, watching the quick skating of the water beetles, and the large faint spots of their shadows darting on the silted mud at the bottom of the trough.
She glanced round on hearing him coming, and smiled nervously: they were mutually afraid of meeting each other again.
“It is about teatime,” he said.
“Yes—it will be ready in a moment—this is not to make the tea with—it’s only to keep a little supply of hot water.”