“Lili always manages to unite the languorous with the poetical,” laughed her sister. “In Heaven’s name, de Woude, propose something. We are all chattering at once, and you—you say nothing.”
Georges laughed, and they went, picking their way through the overhanging foliage, and pushing back the leafy branches, which again closed behind them with a rustling sound. Lili started, frightened at a spider which hovered over her attached to its silvery thread, and when de Woude brushed away the insect they became the objects of general teasing: she, as the timid maiden; he, as a brave knight, slaying the dragons that surrounded her.
“But what have we done, that you are always down upon us?” cried Georges.
“Oh, Georges, don’t you trouble yourself about it,” said Lili. “They think they are very witty. Oh, Paul, how you let us clamber along in this heat. ’Tis quite a journey to that pretty spot of yours. And those tiresome branches too. Ooh!”
She glanced, pouting, at her finger, which had received a scratch from a thorn.
“Let me walk in front of you,” whispered Georges, and he said it so softly and glided so deftly in front of her that the others, amid their laughter at Lili’s mishap, did not notice it. The two dropped behind a little, and Lili smilingly followed after him, while Georges held back the branches until they could no longer touch her face.
“Let them laugh! You don’t care, do you?” he asked, entirely absorbed in his happiness.
“Not a bit,” she answered calmly, shaking her little fair head under the big hat, while a mocking smile formed about her mouth. “We can laugh at them now. Who is that shrieking?”
“Etienne, of course,” said Georges. [[182]]
Paul and Etienne had come upon a grassy spot beneath the chestnut trees, from which a small panorama could be seen: some meadow-land, interspersed by the straight lines of the ditches, sparkling under the bright sky, and here and there a cow. In the distance a little windmill, and beyond it a border of poplars, stately and slender.