"But this is the very prettiest piece of good fortune!" she exclaimed. "Had I arranged the whole matter to suit my own fancy it could not have turned out more happily."
Her tone was that of convincing sincerity; while, as she spoke, the soft colour came and went in her cheeks, and her lips parting showed little, even teeth daintily precious as a row of pearls. The outline of her face was remarkably pure—in shape an oval, a trifle wide in proportion to its length. Her eyebrows were arched, the eyelids arched also—very thin, showing the movement of the eyeballs beneath them, drooping slightly, with a sweep of dark lashes at the outer corner. It struck Richard that she bore a certain resemblance to his mother, though smaller and slighter in build. Her mouth was less full, her hair fairer—soft, glistening hair of all the many shades of heather honey-comb, broken wax and sweet, heady liquor alike. Her hands, he remarked, were very finished—the fingers pointed, the palms rosy. The set of her black, velvet coat revealed the roundness of her bust. The broad brim of her large, black hat, slightly upturned at the sides, and with sweeping ostrich plumes as trimming to it, threw the upper part of her charming face into soft shadow. Her heavy, dove-coloured, silk skirts stood out stiffly from her waist, declaring its slenderness. The few jewels she wore were of notable value. Her appearance, in fact, spoke the last word of contemporary fashion in its most refined application. She was a great lady, who knew the world and the worth of it. And she was absolute mistress both of that knowledge, and of herself—notwithstanding those outstretched hands, and outcry of childlike pleasure,—there, perhaps, lay the exquisite flattery of this last to her hearer! She was all this, and something more than all this. Something for which Dickie, his heart still virgin, had no name as yet. It was new to his experience. A something clear, simple, and natural, as the sunlight, and yet infinitely subtle. A something ravishing, so that you wanted to draw it very close, hold it, devour it. Yet something you so feared, you needs must put it from you, so that, faint with ecstasy, standing at a distance, you might bow yourself and humbly worship. But such extravagant exercises being, in the nature of his case, physically as well as socially inadmissible, the young man was constrained to remain seated squarely in the saddle—that singularly ungainly saddle, moreover, with holster-like appendages to it—while he watched her, wholly charmed, curious and shy, carried indeed a little out of himself, waiting for her to make further disclosures, since he felt absurdly slow and unready of speech.
Nor was he destined to wait in vain. The fair lady appeared agreeably ready to declare herself, and that with the finest turns of voice and manner, with the most coercive variety of appeal, pathos, caprice, and dignity.
"I know on the face of it I have not the smallest right to have taken possession in this way," she continued. "It is the frankest impertinence. But if you realised how extremely I am enjoying myself, you could not fail to forgive me. All this park of yours, all this nature," she turned sideways, sketching out the great view with a broad gesture of the cigarette and graceful hand that held it, "all this is divinely lovely. It is wiser to possess oneself of it in an illicit manner, to defy the minor social proprieties and unblushingly to steal, than not to possess oneself of it at all. If you are really hungry, you know, you learn not to be too nice as to the ways and means of acquiring sustenance."
"And you were really hungry?" Richard found himself saying, as he feared rather blunderingly. But he wanted, so anxiously, the present to remain the present—wanted to continue to watch her, and to hear her. She turned his head. How then could he behave otherwise than with stupidity?
"La! la!" she replied, laughing indulgently, and thereby enchanting him still more; "what must your experience of life be if you suppose one gets a full meal of divine loveliness every day in the week? For my part, I am not troubled with any such celestial plethora, believe me. I was ravening, I tell you, positively ravening."
"And your hunger is satisfied?" he asked, still as he feared blunderingly, and with a queer inward movement of envy towards the wide view she looked upon, and the glory of the sunset which dared touch her hair.
"Satisfied?" she exclaimed. "Is one's hunger for the divinely lovely ever satisfied? Just now I have stayed mine with the merest mouthful—as one snatches a sandwich at a railway buffet. And directly I must get into the train again, and go on with my noisy, dusty, stifling journey. Ah! you are very fortunate to live in this adorable and restful place; to see it in all its fine drama of changing colour and season, year in and year out."
She dropped the end of her cigarette into a little sandy depression in the turf, and drawing aside her silken skirts, trod out the red heart of it neatly with her daintily shod foot. Just then the other lady, she of the gray-green gown, came from within the shelter of the Temple, and stood between the white pillars of the colonnade. Dick's grasp tightened on the handle of the hunting-crop lying across his thigh.
"Am I so very fortunate?" he said, almost involuntarily.