Audrey could run with the speed and grace of a young fawn, but she had not gone half-through the shrubbery before she stopped dead-short. A girl of about her own age was coming hurriedly to meet her. She was a very pretty girl, with black eyes and a quantity of black hair and a richly colored dark face. The girl was dressed somewhat fantastically in many colors. Peeping out from beneath her old-fashioned jacket was a scarf of deep yellow; the skirt of her dress was crimson, and in her hat she wore two long crimson feathers. Audrey regarded her with not only wonder but also disfavor. Who was she? What a vulgar, forward, insufferable young person!
“I say,” cried the girl, coming up eagerly; “I have lost my way, and it is so important! Can you tell me how I can get to the front entrance of the Castle?”
“You ought not to have come by the shrubbery,” said Audrey in a very haughty tone. “The visitors who come to the Castle to-day are expected to use the avenue. But now that you have come,” she added, “if you will take this short cut you will find yourself in the right direction. You have then but to follow the stream of people and you will reach the hall door.”
“Oh, thank you!” said the girl. “I am so awfully hungry! I do hope I shall get in before sunset. Good-by, and thank you so much! My name is Sylvia Leeson; who are you?”
“I am Audrey Wynford,” replied Audrey, speaking more icily than ever.
“Then you are the young lady of the Castle?”
“I am Audrey Wynford.”
“How strange! One would think to meet you here, and one would think to see me here, that we both belonged to Shakespeare’s old play As You Like It. But I must not stay another minute. It is so sweet of your father to invite us all, and if I am not quick I shall lose the fun.”
She nodded with a flash of bright eyes and white teeth at the amazed Audrey, and the next moment was lost to view.
“What a girl!” thought Audrey as she pursued her walk. “How dared she! She did not treat me with one scrap of respect, and she seemed to think—a girl of that sort!—that she was my equal; she absolutely spoke of us in the same breath. It was almost insulting. Sylvia and Audrey! We meet in a wood, and we might be characters out of As You Like It. Well, she is awfully pretty, but—— Oh dear! what a creature she is when all is said and done—that wild dress, and those dancing eyes, and that free manner! And yet—and yet she was scarcely vulgar; she was only—only different from anybody else. Who is she, and where does she come from? Sylvia Leeson. Rather a pretty name; and certainly a pretty girl. But to think of her partaking of hospitality—all alone, too—with the canaille of Wynford!”