Blanche opened the door of the cottage and stood upon the threshold, swinging her hat in her hand. A white butterfly fluttered down aimlessly as a scrap of torn paper, and a bee hung buzzing on a sustained note of content, drowned for a moment as it swung with arched body in the cup of a flower, then booming forth as it shot out and poised on wings that seemed nothing but a glistening blur. Blanche stood with eyes half shut and sniffing nostrils, and as she felt the warm caress of the sun, so positive as to seem almost tangible, on her bare head, she stretched herself, cat-like, with a deep sigh of content.
Life was good here, away from the old faces and the old pursuits. She had been at Paradise only two weeks, but they had been weeks of sun and soft winds and sweet smells, and the impressionable surface of her mind, that beneath was so shallow and so unmalleable, was gradually responding to the influences around her.
Almost imperceptibly to herself her point of view had been changing; a group of white foxgloves, like ghost-flames, that she had seen in a coppice, the creeping of a bright eyed shrew mouse through last year's leaves at her feet, the hundreds of little rabbits with curved-in backs that ran with their curious rocking action over the dewy fields at evening—all these things gave her a shock of pleasure so keen it surprised her. Till now she had not admitted her own artificiality even to herself; now that she was regaining directness she told herself she could afford to be more candid.
Nearly every day she and Ishmael, with Vassie and sometimes Killigrew or Judy, or even the Parson, would go on long expeditions to the cromlechs and carns of the country around; but sometimes she and Ishmael would slip away together, defying convention, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a light market-gig—casual wanderings with no fixed goal, and inexpressibly delightful to both. On sunny days they put up the pony at some farm, and lay upon the short, warm grass of a cliff-face watching the foam patterns form and dissolve again beneath a diamond scatter of spray. When the sea-mist rolled up steadily over Cloom like blown smoke, here opaque, there gossamer-thin, they would sally forth and tramp the spongy moors, the ground sobbing beneath their feet and the mournful calling of the gulls sounding in their heedless ears. And all the while her turns of head and throat, the inflections of her low, rich voice, were being registered on a mind free till now of all such impressions and tenacious as a child's. Small wonder that as the days drifted past Ishmael felt that he, too, was drifting on a tide of golden waters to some shore of promise in a golden dawn.
Blanche, too, was slipping into something like love these days; the beauty of their surroundings and something simple and primitive in the boy himself both made the same appeal to her. Was it possible that after all her flirtations, all her insincerities, she should capture the birthright of the single-hearted? It seemed so, for Blanche had this much of grace left—she was responsive to simplicity. There was something more than the instinct of the coquette in the fullness with which she gave him all he asked, step by step; she had thrown away calculation and was letting herself be guided by her own instinct and the finer instinct she felt to be in him. Each demand his moods made on her she met, each thing his reverent hand unconsciously asked of hers as he helped her over the rough places, each expression his eyes looked for in hers—she gave them all. For here was that rarest of rare things, a man to whom all could be given without his prizing less highly gift or giver.
Long after she had gone to bed he would walk the fields and make sweet picture-plans, all centred tenderly round her. He would stand and look up at her window when the light in it was out, picturing the room, the freshness, the delightful girlishness of it, and at this intimacy of thought he would redden in the dark. His sense of humour was in abeyance, and the reality, could he have seen it, would have been a shock to him—the dressing-table a litter of cosmetics and pin-curls; and on the pillow the face of Blanche surrounded by wavers and shiny with cold-cream.
On this golden morning Ishmael found Blanche, as she had meant him to, in the garden at Paradise, the sun turning her ashen hair to fire.
"Don't let's waste a minute of to-day," he said. "We'll have the cart out and not come back till the evening—that is, if you care about it?"
"Of course I care about it," she told him, and ran upstairs to pin on a shady hat and powder her face.
"Shall I speak now? Shall I speak now?" thought Ishmael as he drove down the lane; but with a thrill of anticipation came "No—my hands aren't free." For Mrs. Penticost's cob, a nervous, spirited creature, newly broken in, was between the shafts.