"You would please me best by going away, and never letting me see your face again," she answers with equal bitterness.
There is the sound of a step on the gravel, and a man's laugh—a peculiar vibrating laugh that brings the color into Honor's face—reaches them in the stillness.
But the steps pass on, and do not come near their corner among the old fruit-trees. Brian Beresford bends nearer to the girl, lying there amid the bending branches, with the sunshine on her averted face.
"You are only a child, Honor, for all your twenty summers! You no more know your own heart than I do. Take care! If you send me away—me and my love—you may find that you have made a mistake!"
But she will not answer him—she will not even look at him. For all the sign of life she gives she might be that Sleeping Beauty to whom he first likened her.
"If ever you should feel sorry, Honor, for what you have said to-day—if ever you should care to have me back, either as a friend or lover, send for me, and I will come."
The words are calm enough, but by some instinct she divines that the face bent close to hers is neither calm or cold. She hears him go away, as he came, through the gap in the high hedge, but she does not even open her eyes to watch him go. But, when all is still again, and she knows that he has passed away out of her life, as surely as he has passed out of the old-fashioned garden, she bursts into tears.
"Oh, what has come to me?" she says to herself again and again, in a very maze of wonder at her own sensations. "I do not love the man. His coming or his going matters nothing to me."
But, although she says this, not once but many times, the words bring her no comfort. They do not still for one moment the inexplicable plain that has risen in her heart. She gets up after awhile and goes back to the house, choosing the small door at the side, so that she may meet no one.
Aileen is ironing in the large front-kitchen, smoothing out, as she calls it, one of Honor's pretty white dresses. It is a labor of love with the old woman, and every week she comes up from her little cottage to perform it.