'Were you? I wish I were going. Especially to Barbizon. The country would suit me.'
Mildred longed to say, 'I shall be glad if you'll let me lend you the money,' but she didn't dare. At the end of a long silence, Ralph said:
'I think we'd better be going on. It must be nearly ten.'
V.
As the spring advanced they spent more and more time in the park. They learnt to know it in its slightest aspects; they anticipated each bend of the lake's bank; they looked out for the tall trees at the end of the island, and often thought of the tree that leaned until its lower leaves swept the water's edge. Close to this tree was their favourite seat. And, as they sat by the water's edge in the vaporous afternoons, the park seemed part and parcel of their love of each other; it was their refuge; it was only there that they were alone; the park was a relief from the promiscuity of the galleries. In the park they could talk without fear of being overheard, and they took interest in the changes that spring was effecting in this beautiful friendly nature— their friend and their accomplice.
'The park is greener than it was yesterday,' he said. 'Look at that tree! How bright the green, and how strange it seems amid all the blackness.'
'And that rose cloud and the reflection of the evening in the lake, how tranquil.'
'And that great block of buildings, Queen Anne's Mansions, is it not beautiful in the blue atmosphere? In London the ugliest things are beautiful in the evening. No city has so pictorial an atmosphere.'
'Not Paris?'
'I've not seen Paris; I've never been out of England.'