“I—I don’t think I shall go to-day, Gipsy. Shall we go for a walk across the fields?”
“You ought to go to Starden,” she said. “She—she will expect you.”
But a spirit of reckless defiance had come to him.
“She won’t miss me if I don’t go.”
“No, she won’t miss you,” the girl said softly, and her voice shook.
“So—so come with me, Gipsy girl.”
“If you wish it.”
“You know I do.”
Yet when they went together across the fields, when they came to the edge of the hop-garden and saw the neatly trailing vines, which this year looked better and more promising than he could ever remember before, they had nothing to say to one another, not a word. Once he took her hand and held it for a moment, then let it go again; and at the touch of her he thrilled, little dreaming how her heart responded.
He scarcely looked at her. If he had, he might have seen a glow in her cheeks, a brightness in her eyes, the brightness born of a new and wonderful hope.