“The rain was now coming down in torrents” was the first sentence which met her glance. She read the phrase over two or three times as though it were some abstruse statement in mathematics. Its incongruousness annoyed her. It was nonsense for any one to write like that. Why, it was so hot... so hot that... The book, falling from her hand, slipped over the side of the hammock and dropped almost soundlessly on to the thick turf below.
The next thing of which she was conscious was of waking suddenly to the sound of a crisp masculine voice remarking succinctly and on a note of intense astonishment:
“Well, I’m hanged!”
Ann stirred and rather unwillingly opened her eyes to find herself gazing straight up into other eyes so vividly blue as to be almost startling. They were looking down at her with a mixture of amusement and unmistakable admiration.
“I’ve been asleep,” she said unnecessarily, still hardly thoroughly awake.
“You have,” agreed the owner of the blue eyes. “And I very nearly took the usual privilege accorded to the prince who’s told off to waken the sleeping beauty.”
At that Ann woke up very completely. The speech savoured of impertinence, and she resented it accordingly, yet it had been so gaily uttered, with a sort of confiding audacity which appeared to take it for granted that she would not be offended, that she found it difficult to feel as righteously indignant as the occasion merited.
“Who are you?” she demanded, sitting up hastily and eyeing the intruder with extreme disfavour. He was hatless, and the sun glinted on dark red locks of the same warm, burnished hue as the skin of a horse-chestnut. The intensely blue eyes gleamed at her from under dominant, strongly-marked brows, and the beaky, high-bridged nose, long-lipped mouth, and stubborn chin all connoted the same arrogant virility.
“I’m Forrester—Brett Forrester, and very much at your service,” he replied cheerfully.
So this was Lady Susan’s “scapegrace nephew”! This gay, confident person who strode forcefully into your garden without so much as a “by-your-leave,” and who conveyed the impression that he would stride forcefully into your life, equally without permission, if it so pleased him. Ann was aware of something extraordinarily vital about the man that attracted her in spite of her first instinctive feeling of aversion.