I was a little short-sighted, and had to get pretty near before I could be certain; but she knew me, and waited my approach. When I came near enough to see them, I could not mistake those violet eyes.
I was now in my twentieth year, and had never been in love. Whether I now fell in love or not, I leave to my reader.
Clara was even more beautiful than her girlish loveliness had promised. ‘An exceeding fair forehead,’ to quote Sir Philip Sidney; eyes of which I have said enough; a nose more delicate than symmetrical; a mouth rather thin-lipped, but well curved; a chin rather small, I confess;—but did any one ever from the most elaborated description acquire even an approximate idea of the face intended? Her person was lithe and graceful; she had good hands and feet; and the fairness of her skin gave her brown hair a duskier look than belonged to itself.
Before I was yet near enough to be certain of her, I lifted my hat, and she returned the salutation with an almost familiar nod and smile.
‘I am very sorry,’ she said, speaking first—in her old half-mocking way, ‘that I so nearly cost you your seat.’
‘It was my own carelessness,’ I returned. ‘Surely I am right in taking you for the lady who allowed me, in old times, to call her Clara? How I could ever have had the presumption I cannot imagine.’
‘Of course that is a familiarity not to be thought of between full-grown people like us, Mr Cumbermede,’ she rejoined, and her smile became a laugh.
‘Ah, you do recognize me, then?’ I said, thinking her cool, but forgetting the thought the next moment.
‘I guess at you. If you had been dressed as on one occasion, I should not have got so far as that.’
Pleased at this merry reference to our meeting on the Wengern Alp, I was yet embarrassed to find that nothing more suggested itself to be said. But while I was quieting my mare, which happily afforded me some pretext at the moment, another voice fell on my ear—hoarse, but breezy and pleasant.