CHAPTER XXVIII.
NOT TO BE RESISTED.
While the Rector still was sitting on the mossy hump of an apple-tree, weary and disconsolate, listening to the murmuring brook, with louder murmurings of his own, he espied a light, well-balanced figure crossing the water on a narrow plank some hundred yards up the streamway.
“A pretty girl!” said the parson; “I am sure of it, by the way she carries herself. Plain girls never walk like that. O that she were coming to my relief! But the board looks rather dangerous. I must go and help her. Ah, here she comes! What a quick light foot! My stars, if she hasn’t got a basket! Nothing for me, of course. No such luck, on this most luckless of all days.”
Meanwhile she was making the best of her way, as straight as the winding stream allowed, towards this ungrateful and sceptical grumbler; and presently she turned full upon him, and looked at him, and he at her.
“What a lovely creature!” thought Mr. Hales; “and how wonderfully her dress becomes her! Why, the mere sight of her hat is enough to drive a young fellow out of his mind almost! Now I should like to make her acquaintance; if I were not starving so. ‘Acrior illum cura domat,’ as Sir Roland says.”
“If you please, sir,” the maiden began, with a bright and modestly playful glance, “are you Mr. Halls, who asked my father for leave to fish this morning?”
“Hales, fair mistress, is my name; a poor and unworthy clerk from Sussex.”
“Then, Mr. Hales, you must not be angry with me for thinking that you might be hungry.”
“And—and thirsty!” gasped the Rector. “Goodness me, if you only knew my condition, how you would pity me!”
“It occurred to me that you might be thirsty too,” she answered, producing from her basket, a napkin, a plate, a knife and fork, half a loaf, and something tied up in a cloth, whose fragrance went to the bottom of the parson’s heart; and after that a stone pipkin, and a half-pint horn, and last of all a pinch of salt. All these she spread on a natural table of grass, which her clever eyes discovered over against a mossy seat.