Hilaria was at present going through a phase of "trying to be good," as the bishop was coming to hold a confirmation, and only those accounted worthy were to be confirmed. Her goodness was of that healthy elastic kind natural to children, which never prevents them doing what they wish, because they instinctively keep it in a compartment to itself. There was no small curiosity about the mysterious rite amongst the boys who were her especial friends, and it had become rather a point of honour to be "done" together. Consequently Hilaria looked very demure as she went through her steps with the mechanical ease of long practice and the supple grace that was her own and yet had the adorable awkwardness of her age in it. She was nearly sixteen, several months younger than Ishmael, who was now just over that age, and who, owing to the reputation for seriousness his secretiveness had earned for him, was one of the candidates undergoing preparation with Old Tring. He had apparently outgrown his fits of unbalanced talkativeness, and had become, with the difficult years, one of those boys who speak with almost comical rarity, and then with unemotional gruffness. This power of reticence never fails to win respect, if of a half-irritated, half-resentful order, and Ishmael held a certain position in the school. Also as the ward of a parson he was supposed to "be good" and know about such things as confirmations. As a matter of fact, he considered his own Tractarian principles, rigidly inculcated by Boase, as superior to the mild evangelical platitudes of Old Tring, and plumed himself accordingly. He was just at that dangerous age, reached somewhat later in the healthy normalities of school than it would have been had he stayed eating his own thoughts at Cloom, when religion either falls away entirely from a boy or flares up into a sudden vitality. Ishmael's blood ran with too much of inherited aptitude for prayer for the former pitfall to ensnare him, but the latter yawned beside him now and he thrilled to its attractions. Sliding his stout, shiny shoe back and forth with the stiff attempt at elegance so deprecated by Mr. Eliot, he asked himself whether the Lord could really countenance such frivolity. It was difficult to think of the things of the soul while so employed, while on the moor, or by Bolowen Pool the thoughts came as naturally as birds. Spring was in his blood and he called it faith, as later he would call it love.
Spring was in the low-browed room at the "George," pouring in at the long windows and spilling in pools of hazy yellow upon the polished boards. Spring was in the old garden outside, touching the warm tangle of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's shining. The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again, while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped through into the fourth dimension. A pair of white butterflies, pearly-grey or golden as they fluttered in and out of those invisible chambers of the air that held sun or shade, chased each other in futile circles; the flower-heads nodded in and out of the brightness; and in the room the white girls dipped into the Danaëan showers and back through the dimness, coloured like the butterflies by the swift transitions, swaying like the blossoms. If not only the spacing of the light but also the waves of movements could have flashed out visibly like the spider's threads the garden and the room would have shown full of the lovely curves.
And Ishmael felt the warm dazzle of the light and thought of the moor and how in another half-hour or so the shadows would be long beside the pool and the trout beginning to rise at their supper, and of how he would like to be a holy hermit and live alone there with a dog and a gun and a rod and God; while Killigrew was divided between trying to signal a question to Hilaria and wishing he could paint the dim room with its splashes of sun and wondering what colours he could get that would be pure enough; and Hilaria was wishing Ishmael would give her a chance to whisper to him the news she was burning to impart and not merely stare at her and everything else with that blank gaze that always seemed to go through her to the wall beyond. And most of the boys itched to get out for an hour or so before supper, while the little girls thoroughly enjoyed themselves and Mr. Eliot wished the whole lot of them, or himself, elsewhere. At last the wheezy piano sounded its last note, the faded lady who once a week thumped it for an hour and the sum of two-and-sixpence gathered her shawl about her and tied the ribbons of her bonnet beneath her pointed chin: the little girls were also enshawled by prim figures who now materialised from the shadowy seats where they had waited for this moment; and the boys, with a hurried touching of caps to Mr. Eliot, went clattering out through the flagged and panelled passage into the High Street. Hilaria, by the door, caught Ishmael's sleeve as he rose from changing his shoes—he was always the last when a fussy quickness was in question—and, ignoring the hovering Killigrew, said in her low husky voice:
"Tell them I can be on the moor in half an hour, will you? I must go and take off this beastly thing first …" She kicked a protesting leg against the framework of her crinoline, that shot out in front of her alarmingly.
"Tell who?" asked Ishmael, densely.
"All of them, of course. Killigrew and Moss minor and the Polkinghornes and Carminow—not Doughty; I didn't like him last time—I don't know why …" She broke off and bent forward, her tones took on a thrill; "I've got it," she announced.
"The new number of 'The Woman in White'? Oh, Hilaria!…"
"It wasn't easy, I can tell you, and we shall have to hurry with it, but it's in my shoe-bag now."
"Must you go home and change? It'll give us so little time. It's dark at eight, and we have to be in to supper then, anyway."
Hilaria hesitated, still slightly leaning forward like a great full-petalled blossom heavy with approaching night.