“You see I decided to go after all,” she said.
“Yes, I knew you would,” he answered.
She was dressed in a simple suit of navy-blue cloth cut V-shaped at the throat, showing the graceful lines of her exquisite neck as it melted into the plump shoulders. She had scorned hoop skirts.
He admired her for this, and yet it made him uneasy. A woman who could defy an edict of fashion was a new thing under the sun, and it scared him.
They were seated in the little sailboat now, drifting out with the tide. It was a perfect day in October, one of those matchless days of Indian summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding silence fill the earth and sky until one feels that words are a sacrilege.
Neither of them spoke for minutes, and his heart grew bold in the stillness. No girl could be still who was unmoved.
She was seated just in front of him on the left, with her hand idly rippling the surface of the silvery waters, gazing at the wooded cliff on the river banks clothed now in their gorgeous robes of yellow, purple, scarlet, and gold.
The soft strains of distant music came from a band in the fort, and her hand in the rippling water seemed its accompaniment.
Ben was conscious only of her presence. Every sight and sound of nature seemed to be blended in her presence. Never in all his life had he seen anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose colour of her cheeks, and all the tints of autumn’s glory seemed to melt into the gold of her hair.
And those eyes he felt that God had never set in such a face before—rich amber, warm and glowing, big and candid, courageous and truthful.