Under the stimulus of his admiration, Lily suddenly blossomed into a self-confidence hitherto unknown to her, and actually learnt to like tennis, and to play passably well.
Occasionally Colin was her adversary, and then he served his balls to her as gently as possible, and she knew it, and was thrilled by his chivalry, although she never made acknowledgment of it to him in any spoken words.
Such tiny little things seemed to count. The way one looked, or didn't look—the seat one chose in the garden at tea-time. The allusions that proved how carefully certain predilections or desires had been noted. And there were the photographs.
All of them had cameras, and groups were taken. Colin always placed himself next to Lily, or sitting at her feet, or standing just behind her, for these.
Colin took photographs of Lily, because that was such a very pretty hat, if she didn't think it rude of him to make a personal remark. And might he take one of her without a hat on at all, for a change?
Lily would just take one snapshot of Colin, because he had put her camera to rights, and they must see if it had been a successful operation.
Colin manœuvred the unsuspecting Sylvia into making use of his Kodak, which was much superior to her own Brownie, so that the photograph which she took of Colin and Lily, alone together on the tennis court, appeared to be a sudden inspiration of her own.
But Lily knew that the whole was a deeply thought-out plot of Colin's, although he never said so. When the films were developed and printed, however, though Colin exhibited them freely, he let Lily know, casually, that only she and he were to have copies of that particular photograph.
The glamour of perfect summer weather lay over it all, and the scent and colour of the innumerable roses with which the Hardinges' garden seemed to be eternally decked. It was the beginning of August, when the halcyon days drew to a close, and on the last evening, they all, under a red harvest moon, went out to the favourite scene of their many excursions—a stretch of common land whereon the heather had just burst into purple bloom.
The undergraduate challenged Dorothy to a race through the thick, impeding clumps, and they sped far ahead, the youth gaining upon her every moment, in spite of a long start and the silk skirt that she had daringly wound round her waist, exposing her frilled petticoats and a shapely length of leg.