Connie rose and came towards him. She was in black with pale pink roses in her hat. In spite of her height, she seemed to him the slightest, gracefullest thing, and as she neared him, she lifted her deep brown eyes, and it was as though he had never seen before how beautiful they were.
“It was kind of you to come!” she said shyly.
He made no reply, till she had placed him beside her under the lime. Then he looked round him, a smile twitching his lip.
“Your aunts are not at home?”
“No. They have gone for their drive. Did you wish to see them?”
“I am in terror of your Aunt Winifred. She and I had many ructions when I was small. She thought our keepers used to shoot her cats.”
“They probably did!”
“Of course. But a keeper who told the truth about it would have no moral sense.”
They both laughed, looking into each other’s faces with a sudden sense of relief from tension. After all the tragedy and the pain, there they were, still young, still in the same world together. And the sun was still shining and flowers blooming. Yet, all the same, there was no thought of any renewal of their old relation on either side. Something unexpressed, yet apparently final, seemed to stand between them; differing very much in his mind from the something in hers, yet equally potent. She, who had gone through agonies of far too tender pity for him, felt now a touch of something chill and stern in the circumstance surrounding him that seemed to put her aside. “This is not your business,” it seemed to say; so that she saw herself as an inexperienced child playing with that incalculable thing—the male. Attempts at sympathy or advice died away—she rebelled, and submitted.
Still there are things—experiments—that even an inexperienced child, a child “of good will” may venture. All the time that she was talking to Falloden, a secret expectation, a secret excitement ran through her inner mind. There was a garden door to her left, across a lawn. Her eyes were often on it, and her ear listened for the click of the latch.