“I remember that too. Dhe! how the whole thing comes back! I wonder—”
“Well!” she pressed.
“I wonder if we walked in the Duke’s garden again, if we could restore the very feelings of that time—the innocence and ignorance of it?”
“I don’t know that I want to do so,” said she, laughing.
“Might we not——” He paused, afraid of his own temerity.
“Try it, you were going to say,” she continued.
“You see I have little of your own gift. I’m willing. I am going to the town, and we might as well go through the grounds as not.”
Something in his manner attracted her; even his simple deference, though she was saying “John Hielan’man, John Hielan’man!” to herself most of the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer—little more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her fretful of, and she was in the mood for escapade.
They walked into the policies, that were no way changed. Still the flowers grew thick on the dykes; the tall trees swayed their boughs: still the same, and yet for Gilian there was, in that faint tinge of yellow in the leaves, some sorrow he had not guessed in the day they were trying to recall.
“It is all just as it was,” said she. “All just as it was; there are the very flowers I plucked,” and she bent and plucked them again.