The lunch commenced.
CHAPTER XLI.
USE OF COATS IN A STORM.
It was a very picturesque group seated that day beneath the golden trees; and the difference in the appearance of each member of the party made the effect more complete.
Redbud, with her mild, tender eyes, and gentle smile and sylvan costume, was the representative of the fine shepherdesses of former time, and wanted but a crook to worthily fill Marlow's ideal; for she had not quite
"A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs,—"
her slender waist was encircled by a crimson ribbon, quite as prettily embroidered as the zone of the old poet's fancy, and against her snowy neck the coral necklace which she wore was clearly outlined, rising and falling tranquilly, like May-buds woven by child-hands into a bright wreath, and launched on the surface of some limpid stream.
And Fanny—gay, mischievous Fanny, with her mad-cap countenance, and midnight eyes, and rippling, raven curls—Fanny looked like a young duchess taking her pleasure, for the sake of contrast, in the woods—far from ancestral halls, and laughing at the follies of the court. Her hair trained back—as Redbud's was—in the fashion called La Pompadour; her red-heeled rosetted shoes—her silken gown—all this was plainly the costume of a courtly maiden. Redbud was the country; Fanny, town.
Between Verty and Ralph, we need not say, the difference was as marked.
The one wild, primitive, picturesque, with the beauty of the woods.