“Well, it was idiotic of me to feel unfriendly to you because you happened to be Glyn’s daughter, and I’m honestly ashamed of myself. I should have loved you at once—you’re rather a dear, you know!—if you had been anyone else. So will you let me love you now, please—if it isn’t too late?”
It was charmingly done, and Jean received the friendly overture with all the enthusiasm dictated by a generous and spontaneous nature.
“Why, of course,” she agreed gladly. “Let’s begin over again”—smiling.
Judith smiled back.
“Yes, we’ll make a fresh start.”
After that, things progressed swimmingly. The slight gene which had attended the earlier stages of the visit vanished, and very soon, prompted by Judith’s eager, interested questions, Jean found herself chatting away quite naturally and happily about her life before she came to Staple and confessing how much she was enjoying her first experience of England.
“It’s all so soft, and pretty, and old,” she said. “I feel as if Staple must always have been here—just where it is, looking across to the Moor, and nodding sometimes, as much as to say, ‘I’ve been here so long that I know some of your secrets.’ The Moor always seems to me to have secrets,” she added dreamily. “Those great tors watch us all the time, just as they’ve watched for centuries. They remind me of the Egyptian Sphinx, they are so still, and silent, and—and eternal-looking.”
“You’ve not been on to Dartmoor yet, have you?” asked Judith. “We have a bungalow up there—Three Fir Bungalow, it’s called. You must come and spend a few days there with us when the weather gets warmer.”
“I should love it,” cried Jean, her eyes sparkling. “I’m aching to go to the Moor. I want to see it in all sorts of moods—when it’s raining, and when the sun’s shining, and when the wind blows. I’m sure it will be different each time—rather like a woman.”
“I think it’s loveliest of all by moonlight,” said Judith, her eyes soft and shining with recollection. She loved all the beauty of the world as much as Jean herself did. “I remember being on the top of one of the tors at night. All the surrounding valleys were hidden in a mist like a silver sea, and I felt as if I had got right away from the everyday world, into a sort of holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits. One almost forgot that one was just an ordinary, plain-boiled human being tied up in a parcel of flesh and bone.”