“She’s much better, thank you.”
He looked at Francie under his lowered lids, and tried to find it in his heart to wish that she could sometimes be a little more grown up and serious. She was leaning back with her hat crushed against a trunk of the tree, so that its brim made a halo round her face, and the golden green light that filtered through the leaves of the lime moved like water over her white dress. If he had ever heard the story of “Undine” it might have afforded him the comforting hypothesis that this delicate, cool, youthful creature, with her provoking charm, could not possibly be weighted with the responsibility of a soul; but an unfortunate lack of early culture denied to Mr. Lambert this excuse for the levity with which she always treated him—a man fifteen years older than she was, her oldest friend, as he might say, who had always been kind to her ever since she was a scut of a child. Her eyes were closed; but an occasional quiver of the long lashes told him that she had no intention of sleeping; she was only pretending to be tired, “out of tricks,” he thought angrily. He waited for a moment or two, and then he spoke her name. The corners of her mouth curved a little, but the eyelashes were not raised.
“Are you tired, or are you shamming?”
“Shamming,” was the answer, still with closed eyes.
“Don’t you think you could open your eyes?”
“No.”
Another short period of silence ensued, and the sound of summer in the air round them strengthened and deepened, as the colour strengthens and deepens in a blush. A wasp strayed in under the canopy of the lime and idled inquisitively about Francie’s hat and the bunch of mignonette in her belt, but she lay so still under this supreme test that Lambert thought she must be really asleep, and taking out his handkerchief prepared to route the invader. At the same moment there came a sound of wheels and a fast-trotting horse on the road; it neared them rapidly, and Miss Fitzpatrick leaped to her feet and put aside the leaves of the lime just in time to see the back of Mr. Hawkins’ head as his polo-cart spun past the Tally Ho gate.
“I declare I thought it was Mr. Dysart,” she said, looking a little ashamed of herself; “I wonder where in the name of fortune is Mr. Hawkins going?”
“I thought you were so dead asleep you couldn’t hear anything,” said Lambert, with a black look; “he’s not coming here, anyhow.”
She dropped back into the corner of the seat again as if the start forward had tired her.