She looked at him blankly.
“Not really!” she exclaimed. “I thought that we were going to walk to Hanging Tor?”
Wingrave took up a handful of letters and let them fall through his fingers. He had all the sensations of a man who is awakened from a dream of Paradise to face the dull tortures of a dreary and eventless life. His eyes were set in a fixed state. An undernote of despair was in his tone.
“You know we arranged it yesterday,” she continued eagerly, “and if you are going to send for Mr. Aynesworth, you needn’t bother about these letters yourself, need you?”
He turned and regarded her deliberately. Her forehead was wrinkled a little with disappointment, her brown eyes were filled with the soft light of confident appeal. Tall and elegantly slim, there was yet something in the graceful lines of her figure which reminded him forcibly that the days of her womanhood had indeed arrived.
She wore a plain white cambric dress and a simple, but much beflowered hat; the smaller details of her toilet all indicated the correct taste and instinctive coquetry of her French descent. And she was beautiful! Wingrave regarded her critically and realized, perhaps for the first time, how beautiful. Her eyes were large and clear, and her eyebrows delicately defined. Her mouth, with its slightly humorous curl, was a little large, but wholly delightful. The sun of the last few weeks had given to her skin a faint, but most becoming, duskiness. Under his close scrutiny, a flush of color stole into her cheeks. She laughed not altogether naturally.
“You look at me,” she said, “as though I were someone strange!”
“I was looking,” he answered, “for the child, the little black-frocked child, you know, with the hair down her back, and the tearful eyes. I don’t think I realized that she had vanished so completely.”
“Not more completely,” she declared gaily, “than the gloomy gentleman who frowned upon my existence and resented even my gratitude. Although,” she added, leaning a little towards him, “I am very much afraid that I see some signs of a relapse today. Don’t bother about those horrid letters. Let me tell Mrs. Tresfarwin to pack us up some lunch, and take me to Hanging Tor, please!”
Wingrave laughed a little unsteadily as he rose to his feet. One day more, then! Why not? The end would be soon enough!...