"Are you not coming then?" stopping short, and growing black with rage: "you don't seem to know your own mind for two minutes together, or else you are trying to provoke me! First you ask me to go to the wood with you, and now you say you will not go. What am I to think of it?"
"I wouldn't be rude, if I were you," says Miss Chesney, calmly, "and I wouldn't lose my temper. You make me absolutely uncomfortable when you let that wicked look grow upon your face. One would think you would like to murder me. Do try to be amiable! And as for trying to provoke you, I should not take the trouble! No, I shall not go with you now, certainly: I shall go with Cyril," pointing to where Cyril is sauntering toward the entrance to the wood at some short distance from them.
Without waiting to address another word to the discomfited Archibald, she runs to Cyril and slips her hand within his arm.
"Will you take me with you wherever you are going?" she says, smiling confidently up into his face.
"What a foolish question! of course I am only too glad to get so dear a little companion," replies he, smothering a sigh very successfully; though, to be honest, he is hardly enraptured at the thought of having Lilian's (or any one's) society just now. Nevertheless he buries his chagrin, and is eminently agreeable to her as they stroll leisurely in the direction of The Cottage.
When they come up to it Lilian pauses.
"I wish this wonderful goddess would come out. I want to see her quite close," she says, peeping through the hedge. "At a distance she is beautiful: I am always wondering whether 'distance lends enchantment to the view.'"
"No, it does not," absently. He is looking over the hedge.
"You seem to know all about it," archly: "shall I ask how? What lovely red berries!" suddenly attracted by some coloring a few yards away from her. "Do you see? Wait until I get some."
Springing on to a bank, she draws down to her some bunches of mountain-ash berry, that glow like live coals in the fading greenery around them, and having detached her prize from the parent stem, prepares to rejoin her companion, who is somewhat distant.