They strolled across the neglected lawn, matted with horse-mint, too spicy a vegetable to the taste of the stock that wandered over the place. The drive once paved with shell, made a wide circular sweep in front of the house, but the shell had disappeared under the horse-mint too. Part of the old bed enclosed within the drive Pen had dug up and put in a few dahlias. These she had essayed to protect from the horses and cows and sheep by a miscellaneous barricade of boxes and boards. She blushed for it now. She couldn't explain to him that she had an instinct for flowers that had to find some outlet.
The earthen bank was sixty feet high. In the days of the place's glory an ingenious gardener had planted honeysuckle at the base to keep it from washing and now the tangled vines swept all the way up to their feet in a bottle green wave flecked with the foam of its pale blossoms. The scent of it was dangerously enervating to youth.
"The whole world down here is full of honeysuckle," murmured Don. "In the evening you can smell it far out in the Bay."
An ineffably lovely panorama was spread before them, which the light haze customary to that soft land, endowed with a curiously moving quality. For awhile in silence their eyes ranged back and forth from Absolom's Island on the one side out over the intenser blue of the Bay. At their feet rode a battered old schooner with a deckload of cord wood. Down at the left the octagonal lighthouse on its spindly legs was just within range of their vision.
"My camp is down there," said Don. "On the other side of the old wharf. The curve in the beach hides it."
They sat down with their feet hanging over the edge. Pen's conscience was protesting more faintly now. She had recovered from her surprise attack and had her forces pretty well in hand. She found she was all right if she avoided looking at him. There was something leaping out of his eyes that simply confounded her. They talked about anything and nothing. He wanted to make her talk, whereas she desired to hear him. So they fenced. The little undertones of bitterness, of self-mockery, in Pen's laughter struck powerfully on the man's imagination. It appeared that this girl most decidedly had a flavor of her own.
He was reluctant to talk about himself and Pen could not ask questions. Consequently her hungry ears were obliged to pounce on the implications of his talk for information. He was of the great world it appeared. He knew everybody. He was not a mere philistine. He knew books, pictures, music; all that Pen thirsted for; and the people who made such things were among his friends. "Though I'm only a common stockbroker," he put in with a laugh. This pleased Pen. She thought: "I wouldn't want an artist for a lover"—and blushed for the thought. He was exactly what she wished him to be. It seemed to her magical that such a one should have been brought into her life if only for an hour or two. Only for an hour or two! She kept telling herself that firmly. "He'll be gone to-morrow and I wishing he had never come!" That was the explanation of the bitterness.
She did ask him one question. "How on earth did you come to stray down here?"
He said: "I read somewhere, years ago, what a lovely and little known country there was on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay ... I keep a canoe and a little tent handy in a club-house in New York. Whenever the world is too much with me I just paddle off for a few days."
Pen's few minutes lengthened out into an hour and she had simply not the strength to send him away. In the end her father was seen approaching, his discolored straw hat placed just so, a jute bag over his arm.