“Oh, yes, ask Mr. Grainger to come out into the garden!” she said.
Hugh came out, hatless, from the house, and she advanced to meet him, pulling off one of her heavy leather gloves.
“Ah, this is delightful, Mr. Hugh!” she said. “Canon Alington told me last week that you would be down here some day soon, though he did not then know the exact date. And you have remembered your promise to come to see me. You’ll stop for lunch, won’t you?”
“Why, yes, please,” said Hugh, “if you are sure you can bear me till then.”
He looked at his watch.
“I am bound to tell you it is only just half-past eleven,” he said.
“Yes, I really can bear you till then. This dear place is like a new toy to me still, and I have to show everything to everybody who comes, down to the wood-shed where a very fierce cat with kittens will fly at you if you go too close, and a half-built hen-yard where at present five mournful hens are putting dust on their heads in the manner of Oriental widows because their husband is no more.”
“Did you have a funeral?” asked Hugh. “Daisy and I had a beautiful funeral yesterday over a dead mouse.”
“No; you weren’t here to help, and, like Peggy, I’m not good at playing. Besides, the corpse was missing. It had been eaten.”
She, too, was hatless, and the breeze and the sun of summer seemed to shine in her face. Young as she always looked in this superb noon of her beauty, this fortnight of open-air life seemed to have flushed and flooded her with its freshness. Quickly and easily as they had made friends, it seemed to Hugh that in this moment and over their trivial words a great step toward further intimacy had been taken. Though this impression was as instantaneous a result as some drowsy flash of summer lightning, it had been there; far away in those clouds the authentic fire of the heavens had gleamed.