“Let us go for a walk,” said Ivy, despairingly. “At any rate out of doors we can have air and sunshine—we shall have enough of our wretched rooms later on.”
“Come and see the river,” said Myra Kay. “They say there are lovely views by the Findhorn.”
Ralph consented, and the three walked out together into the country, and did their best to forget the troubles that hemmed them in, as they wandered among the flowery fields, where Ivy gathered violets and primroses to her heart’s content. Presently by the river, among the soft early green of the bushes, they came to a fallen tree, and here they established themselves while Ralph read to them. They had indulged in two or three of Dickens’ novels at an old bookstall in Edinburgh in their days of plenty, and when fortune frowned upon them these shabby volumes had proved a perfect godsend. They had solaced many a cold journey and brightened many a dreary lodging-house, and they helped now to distract them from the thought of their daily increasing troubles.
It seemed to Ivy when she looked back afterwards, that this afternoon by the Findhorn was the last really happy day she was ever to know. She sat cosily ensconced on the tree trunk with her lap full of flowers which she delighted in arranging; and Ralph lay on the grass at her feet with his head propped against the smooth surface of the fallen beech tree. She noticed how the short waves of his crisp, brown hair contrasted with the silver-grey of the bark, and how the careworn look which had grown upon him during the tour was entirely banished now as flashes of mirth passed over his face, caused by the sayings of Grip the Raven.
Myra Kay sat just beyond him; she was knitting socks for her fiancé, listening at times to the reading, but more often dreaming of her own future. Everywhere there was that sense of hope and joyous expectation that seems to belong to the spring-time: the birds sang as Ivy had never heard them sing before; the lambs frisked delightfully in the soft, green meadows near their somewhat uninteresting mothers; and into her half-taught, eager mind there somehow floated new ideas of the meaning of “green pastures and still waters,” and a firmer confidence in a Shepherd who would not forget even the members of a travelling company in grievous straits up in the north of Scotland.
“Oh don’t let us go just yet!” she exclaimed, as Ralph closed the book. “It can’t be time to go back to those stuffy rooms.”
“I’m in no hurry,” said Ralph, stretching himself, and falling back into a more comfortable attitude.
He could not see Ivy’s face, but he could see her little, slender fingers as they pulled the petals off a daisy. The result seemed to displease her; she threw away the remains of the flower, and gathering another diligently pulled off each pink-tipped petal, but again threw the stalk from her with a little impatient gesture. Then she began upon a third, and had become absorbed in her counting, when suddenly she felt Ralph’s hand lay hold of hers.
“Caught in the act,” he said, laughing. “Don’t you know that fortune-telling is illegal?”
“Not if you tell your own,” said Ivy.