Many women and most men marry for a variety of reasons not unconnected with externals. There has been much spoken and written on the subject of "affinities," a term at the best insecure, and often pernicious, but very occasionally, when the two people concerned are elemental creatures with little perception of those half-shades which are the bane of civilization, there does occur a flashing recognition which defies known laws of liking, and this it was which came to Manuel and Senath now.
"Falling in love" is ordinarily a complex, many-sided thing, compact of doubts and hesitations, fluctuating with the mood and with that powerful factor, the opinions of others. It is subject to influence by trivialities, varying affections and criticisms, and the surface of it is an elastic tissue setting this way and that, as thoughts ebb and flow from moment to moment, even though far beneath it may remain unperturbed. Yet every now and then come together two of that vanishing race who are capable of feeling an emotion in the round—the whole sphere of it. This sense of a spherical emotion came to Senath as she would have pictured the onslaught of a thunder-ball, save that this fire had the quality of warming without scorching utterly.
Looking up, as she stood there stricken motionless, she saw him transfigured to a glowing lambency by the blaze of the setting sun full on his face; and he, staring down, saw her against it. Her linen sun bonnet, which had slipped back on her shoulders and was only held by the strings beneath her chin, was brimming with sunlight, like some magic pilgrim's pack; and her eyes, opened widely in her worn, delicately seamed face, gained in blueness from the shadow her face and neck made against the brightness. Even so, to most people she would have appeared only a wholesome-looking woman in early middle life, who had kept the clear and candid gaze of childhood; a woman rather ungainly and thick-set. Manuel saw her as what, for him, she was—a deep-bosomed creature, cool of head and warm of heart—a woman worth many times over the flimsy girls who would pass her with a pitying toss of the head. Manuel thought none of this consciously; he was only aware of a pricking feeling of interest and attraction, and had he been asked his opinion would have said she seemed a fine, upstanding woman enough. Then, when Mrs. Cotton came out again with the twine and a big packing-needle, he, too, climbed down and, his fingers being younger and more supple than Sam's, attended to the stitching of the rein.
"Must be gwain on, I b'lieve," announced Sam, when this was in progress. "Can't us giv'ee a lift, Senath? I'm sure us wont mind sitten familiar if you don't, will us, Manuel, my dear?"
"Why, no, thank'ee, Sam," said Senath quickly, "I do rare and like a bit of a walk before goin' to the bed. Evenen to you, and thank you, Sam. Evenen, Mr. Harvey."
He raised a face into which the blood had come with stooping over the rein.
"Evenen, Miss Lear," he muttered.
She started down the road at a good pace so as to have turned off before they came up with her, but she heard the clip-clop of the horse's hoofs as she drew alongside with the Pipers, and she turned in towards them through a gap in the hedge. She pushed a way among bracken and clinging brambles, and as she reached them the sun slipped behind the S. Just hills, and in the glamorous mingling of the afterglow with the swift dusk she stood, as the gig, the two men in it apparently borne along level with the top of the hedge by some mysterious agency, passed by.
For a while she stood there, the dew gathering on stone and twig and leaf. She glanced up at the two dark columns reared above, her hand against the rough surface of the nearer one.
"Must give en names, too," she said, with a backward thought for her Merry Maidens. "Why shoulden I call they after Sam and his new tenant? That one can be Sam,"—looking at the stumpier and wider of the two, "and the tall one, he can be Manuel."