"No, indeed! Turn your back, and I'll jump."
"Let—"
"No!"
Andrew wheeled on his heel. There was a soft thud and a scramble. He turned like a flash, but Miss Moore had regained her feet, and stood waiting with an expression of exaggerated patience on her face.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
"Oh, waiting," she answered, with emphasis.
That walk was the first they ever had together. Neither of them ever forgot it. At the moment, it seemed to pass in light-hearted chatter: but beneath all this there was a substratum of eagerness—Judith trying to get in touch with this new creature at her side, this strong, unconventional, natural soul, so different from the artificial creatures she had known; and Andrew feeling his heart going out beyond control to this girl who walked so unsteadily at his side, stumbling every now and then from the unaccustomed roughness of the way. These little feet had evidently had all paths smoothed to them. (He could not guess how chill those carven pathways were.) How tender her eyes grew over the wild flowers, and how sweet her lips when, for a moment, a serious thought came to her!
The wild flowers were in full luxuriance, and Judith gathered an armful. They passed a dogwood tree that stood sheeted in its white blossoms, their petals of the texture of white kid. Andrew got her some great branches of it, and she insisted upon carrying it herself, holding all her spoil against her breast with one hand, using the other to lift her gown now and then, or to pluck more flowers.
Her face looked out from the flowers with a kind of rapt eagerness upon it that illumined it like a light. Her enjoyment was so intense as to be almost painful. They had gone quite a distance from the Morris house, half the length of Andrew's woods, when they came to a little hollow. A stream ran through it, but so blocked was its way by the burrows of moles that it zigzagged across and across the hollow, seeming almost to form loops at some points. All along its course grew the tall, pale-mauve water-flag, its spikes of bloom rising from clumps of sword-like leaves that grew in the stream's edge. At the farther side of the hollow a mass of wild crab-apple trees were covered with their fragile pink blooms, and heaped up at one end of the hollow was a great mass of loose stones, piled there as they had been gathered from the fields. Dog-tooth violets, which love moisture, grew thickly about their feet, their yellow and brown blossoms springing from between pairs of spotted leaves. Where the leaves grew singly, there were no flowers. Here and there could be seen a blossom of the rarer white variety, the back of its recurved petals delicately tinged with pink. Close by the roots of some stumps there were velvety cushions of the thick green moss so often found in Canadian woods; bryony vines strayed over these, making a rich brocade in tones of green. Tufts of coarse ferns grew in the clefts of the stumps, their last year's fronds withering beside them, the fresh ones just beginning to uncurl. And framing all this in, there was the curtain of trees in the first freshness of foliage.
For a moment, in Judith's mind dream and reality became confused. The little glade so exactly simulated a well-set scene. There was something artificial in the piled-up stones: in the stream which made so much of itself in going such a short distance. It was so usual for her to stand before the footlights with her arms full of flowers. And the man at her side—she looked at him, and in a moment realized how completely and artistically he was in accord with his environment. His strong, bronzed face, his lithe, tall form, his expression, his dress, the look of utter comprehension with which his eyes took in the scene, over which her eyes lingered in detail—all this was apparent to her at once. She was well used to considering the "value" of this or that upon the scene, and she told herself the unities were surely satisfied now.