He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish figure.
“Don’t talk!” said Morrison. “I’m sure it is lovely through here.”
She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.
“Oh, look!” she cried. “Look at the pine stems through the sea-green of the beeches. Purple they are, and don’t they swing?”
“I like the wind in the trees,” said Mendel.
He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.
“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself very clearly, stamping out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had spoken to him.
The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.
He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest she should awake.