She threw back her head, and examined the prospect critically. Afterwards, she returned her gaze to Peter, with an air of polite readiness to defer to his opinion.
“It is not too sensational? Not too much like a landscape on the stage?”
“We must judge it leniently,” said he; “we must remember that it is only unaided Nature. Besides,” he added, “to be meticulously truthful, there is a spaciousness, there is a vivacity in the light and colour, there is a sense of depth and atmosphere, that we should hardly find in a landscape on the stage.”
“Yes—perhaps there is,” she admitted thoughtfully.
And with that, they looked into each other's eyes, and laughed.
“Are you aware,” the lady asked, after a brief silence, “that it is a singularly lovely evening.”
“I have a hundred reasons for thinking it so,” Peter answered, with the least approach to a meaning bow.
In the lady's face there flickered, perhaps, for half a second, the faintest light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she went on, with fine detachment
“How calm and still it is. The wonderful peace of the day's compline. It seems as if the earth had stopped breathing—does n't it? The birds have already gone to bed, though the sun is only just setting. It is the hour when they are generally noisiest; but they have gone to bed—the sparrows and the finches, the snatchers and the snatched-from, are equal in the article of sleep. That is because they feel the touch of autumn. How beautiful it is, in spite of its sadness, this first touch of autumn—it is like sad distant music. Can you analyse it, can you explain it? There is no chill, it is quite warm, and yet one knows somehow that autumn is here. The birds know it, and have gone to bed. In another month they will be flying away, to Africa and the Hesperides—all of them except the sparrows, who stay all winter. I wonder how they get on during the winter, with no goldfinches to snatch from?”
She turned to Peter with a look of respectful enquiry, as one appealing to an authority for information.