“I must go now,” she said gently, “but it is growing late. May I not call some one to take you indoors?”
“Please,” he answered, “if you will go there to the small stone house and tell Mother Susan I am awake, she will have some one look after me. But I say it has been ripping meeting you in this unexpected way when I thought I was too used up even to want to look at a girl. Tomorrow perhaps——”
“Tomorrow we are returning to London on the early morning train.” Nona suffered a relapse into her former cold manner. She was a democrat, of course, and came from a land which taught that all men were equal. But she was a southern girl and the south had been living a good many years on the thought of its old families after their wealth had been taken away. Therefore, there were limits as to what degree of friendliness, even of familiarity, one could endure from a gardener’s son.
Nevertheless, the young fellow was a soldier and, one felt instinctively, a gallant one.
“Good-by; I hope you may soon be quite well again,” Nona added, and then went across the grass to the gardener’s house.
The young man was not accustomed to the poetic fancies that had been besetting him this last quarter of an hour; they must be due to weakness. But somehow the strange girl looked to him like a pale ray of afternoon sunshine as he watched her disappear. She did not come near his resting place again.
CHAPTER IX
“But Yet a Woman”
Most of the next day the American Red Cross girls devoted to seeing London. They had visited The Tower and Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament soon after their arrival. So, as the sun was shining with unusual vigor for London, they concluded to spend the greater part of their final time out of doors.
London in late May or early June is a city transformed. During the winter she is gray and cold and formidable, so that the ordinary American traveler often finds himself antagonistic and depressed. Then the Englishman appears as cold and unfriendly as his skies. But let the sun shine and the flowers bloom in the parks and the spirit of the city and its people changes.