But the greengrocer from Kent reeled down the street to the nearest public-house. At closing time he was telling, in muffled, muddled speech, the wondrous tale, how his girl was a real lady, awfully gone on him, pretty as paint, and wore silk dresses every day.
"She's a real lady—she is," he said.
"Ay!" said the chucker out, "we know all about them sort o' ladies. Time, please!"
"I tell you she is—her aunt's a lady of title, and the gal's that gone on me I expect I'll have to marry her to keep her quiet."
"I'll have to chuck you out to keep you quiet," returned the other. "Come on—outside!"
THE BRUTE
THE pearl of the dawn was not yet dissolved in the gold cup of the sunshine, but in the northwest the dripping opal waves were ebbing fast to the horizon, and the sun was already half risen from his couch of dull crimson. She leaned out of her window. By fortunate chance it was a jasmine-muffled lattice, as a girl's window should be, and looked down on the dewy stillness of the garden. The cloudy shadows that had clung in the earliest dawn about the lilac bushes and rhododendrons had faded like grey ghosts, and slowly on lawn and bed and path new black shadows were deepening and intensifying.
She drew a deep breath. What a picture! The green garden, the awakened birds, the roses that still looked asleep, the scented jasmine stars! She saw and loved it all. Nor was she unduly insensible to the charm of the central figure, the girl in the white lace-trimmed gown who leaned her soft arms on the window-sill and looked out on the dawn with large dark eyes. Of course, she knew that her eyes were large and dark, also that her hair was now at its prettiest, rumpled and tumbled from the pillow, and far prettier so than one dared to allow it to be in the daytime. It seemed a pity that there should be no one in the garden save the birds, no one who had awakened thus early just that he might gather a rose and cover it with kisses and throw it up to the window of his pretty sweetheart. She had but recently learned that she was pretty. It was on the evening after the little dance at the Rectory. She had worn red roses at her neck, and when she had let down her hair she had picked up the roses from her dressing-table and stuck them in the loose, rough, brown mass, and stared into the glass till she was half mesmerised by her own dark eyes. She had come to herself with a start, and then she had known quite surely that she was pretty enough to be anyone's sweetheart. When she was a child a well-meaning aunt had told her that as she would never be pretty or clever she had better try to be good, or no one would love her. She had tried, and she had never till that red-rose day doubted that such goodness as she had achieved must be her only claim to love. Now she knew better, and she looked out of her window at the brightening sky and the deepening shadows. But there was no one to throw her a rose with kisses on it.