Blanche turned to him with too ready a smile; but then she was really not such a great age as she pretended, and she had never been in better spirits in her life.
"You hear, Sweep! I call it rather lucky for you that you were—"
But just then she saw his face, and remembered the things that had been said about Henry Craven by the Cazalets' friends, even ten years ago, when she really had been a girl.
V AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
She really was one still, for in these days it is an elastic term, and in Blanche's case there was no apparent reason why it should ever cease to apply, or to be applied by every decent tongue except her own. If, however, it be conceded that she herself had reached the purely mental stage of some self-consciousness on the point of girlhood, it can not be too clearly stated that it was the only point in which Blanche Macnair had ever been self-conscious in her life.
Much the best tennis-player among the ladies of the neighborhood, she drove an almost unbecomingly long ball at golf, and never looked better than when paddling her old canoe, or punting in the old punt. And yet, this wonderful September afternoon, she did somehow look even better than at either or any of those congenial pursuits, and that long before they reached the river; in the empty house, which had known her as baby, child and grown-up girl, to the companion of some part of all three stages, she looked a more lustrous and a lovelier Blanche than he remembered even of old.
But she was not really lovely in the least; that also must be put beyond the pale of misconception. Her hair was beautiful, and perhaps her skin, and, in some lights, her eyes; the rest was not. It was yellow hair, not golden, and Cazalet would have given all he had about him to see it down again as in the oldest of old days; but there was more gold in her skin, for so the sun had treated it; and there was even hint or glint (in certain lights, be it repeated) of gold mingling with the pure hazel of her eyes. But in the dusty shadows of the empty house, moving like a sunbeam across its bare boards, standing out against the discolored walls in the place of remembered pictures not to be compared with her, it was there that she was all golden and still a girl.
They poked their noses into the old bogy-hole under the nursery stairs; they swung the gate at the head of the next flight; they swore to finger-marks on the panels that were all the walls of the top story, and they had a laugh in every corner, childish crimes to reconstruct, quite bitter battles to fight over again, but never a lump in either throat that the other could have guessed was there. And so out upon the leafy lawn, shelving abruptly to the river; round first, however, to the drying-green where the caretakers' garments were indeed drying unashamed; but they knew each other well enough to laugh aloud, had picked each other up much farther back than the point of parting ten years ago, almost as far as the days of mixed cricket with a toy set, on that very green.