"But you needn't take such very long steps: these three cottages are the last. Do you know I'm very nearly running?"
Of course he slackened his pace and begged her pardon; but in so doing he relapsed into the uneasy self-consciousness of their first interview. When they reached the gate of the avenue he held it open for her to pass, murmuring something about walking a bit further. Barbara looked at him in surprise, and then, with a little smiling nod, went away under the trees, wondering what was amiss. "I can't have offended him—how could I?" she said to herself, and she made up her mind that her new friend was certainly queer. It was the Rothwell temper, no doubt, and yet his awkward muttering had been more like the manner of a sullen schoolboy. A Rothwell should have been loftily superior, even if he were disagreeable. It was true, as Barbara reflected, almost in spite of herself, that Mr. Harding had no such hereditary obligation on the pork-butcher side of his pedigree.
Reynold had spoken out of the bitterness of his heart, and a bitter frankness is the frankest of all. But perhaps he had not shown his wisdom when he so quickly confided his grandfather to Miss Strange. Because we may have tact enough to choose the mood in which our friend shall listen to our secret, we are a little too apt to forget that the secret, once uttered, remains with him in all his moods. In this case the girl had been a sympathetic listener, but young Harding scarcely intended that the elder Reynold should be so vividly realised.
Later, when all outside the windows was growing blank and black, Barbara went up to dress for dinner. She was nearly ready when there came a knock at her door, and she hurried, candle in hand, to open it. In the gloom of the passage stood the red-armed village girl who waited on her.
"Please, miss, the gentleman told me to give you this," said the messenger, awkwardly offering something which was only a formless mass in the darkness.
"What?" said Miss Strange, and turned the light upon it. The wavering little illumination fell on a confusion of autumn leaves, rich with their dying colours, and shining with rain. Among them, indistinctly, were berries of various kinds, hips and haws, and poison clusters of a deeper red, vanishing for a moment as the draught blew the candle flame aside, and then reappearing. One might have fancied them blood drops newly shed on the wet foliage.
"Oh!" Barbara exclaimed in surprise, and after a moment's pause, "give them to me." She gathered them up, despite some thorny stems, with her disengaged hand, and went back into her room. So that was the meaning of Mr. Harding's solitary walk! She stood by the table, delicately picking out the most vivid clusters, and trying their effect against the soft cloud of her hair, cloudier than ever in the dusk of her mirror. "I hope he hasn't been slipping into any more ditches!" she said to herself.
With that she sighed, for the thought recalled to her the melancholy of an autumnal landscape. She remembered an earlier gift, roses and myrtle, a summer gift, the giver of which had gone when the summer waned. She had seen him last on a hot September day. "We never said good-bye," Barbara thought, and let her hand hang with the berries in it. "He said he should not go till the beginning of October. When he came that afternoon and I was out, and he only saw uncle, I was sure he would come again. Well, I suppose he didn't care to. He could if he liked—a girl can't; there are lots of things a girl can't do; but a man can call if he pleases. Well, he must have gone away before now. And he didn't even write a line, he only sent a message by uncle, his kind regards—Who wants his kind regards?—and he was sorry not to see me. Very well, my kind regards, and I'm sure I don't want to see him!"
She ended her meditations with an emphatic little nod, but the girl in the mirror who returned it had such a defiantly pouting face that she quite took Barbara by surprise.
"I'm not angry," Miss Strange declared to herself after a pause. "Not the least in the world. The idea is perfectly absurd. It was just a bit of the summer, and now the summer is gone." And so saying she put Mr. Harding's autumn berries in her hair, and fastened them at her throat, and, with her candle flickering dimly through the long dark passages, swept down to the yellow drawing-room to thank him for his gift.