She shot a quick glance at him. He became suddenly interesting to her. She was at the age of dreams and speculations. From being merely an ordinary young man with rather more ease of manner than the majority of the young men she had met, he developed in an instant into something worthy of closer attention. He took on a certain mystery and romance. She wondered what sort of a girl it was that he loved. Examining him in the light of this new discovery, she found him attractive. Something seemed to have happened to put her in sympathy with him. She noticed for the first time a latent forcefulness behind the pleasantness of his manner. His self-possession was the self-possession of the man who had been tried and has found himself.
At the bottom of her consciousness, too, there was a faint stirring of some emotion, which she could not analyse, not unlike pain. It was vaguely reminiscent of the agony of loneliness which she had experienced as a small child on the rare occasions when her father had been busy and distrait and had shown her by his manner that she was outside his thoughts. This was but a pale suggestion of that misery, but nevertheless there was a resemblance. It was a rather desolate, shut-out sensation, half resentful.
It was gone in a moment. But it had been there. It had passed over her heart as the shadow of a cloud moves across a meadow in the summer-time.
For some moments she stood without speaking. Jimmy did not break the silence. He was looking at her with an appeal in his eyes. Why could she not understand? She must understand.
But the eyes that met his were those of a child.
As they stood there the horse, which had been cropping in a perfunctory manner at the short grass by the roadside, raised his head and neighed impatiently. There was something so human about the performance that Jimmy and the girl laughed simultaneously. The utter materialism of the neigh broke the spell. It was a noisy demand for food.
“Poor Dandy!” said Molly. “He knows he’s near home, and he knows it’s his dinner-time.”
“Are we near the castle, then?”
“It’s a long way round by the road, but we can cut across the fields. Aren’t these English fields and hedges just perfect? I love them! Of course I loved America, but——”
“Have you left New York long?” asked Jimmy.