She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent, essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and led, and to love the guide.
Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet with the beating of celestial wings.
She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her, she said to herself that she would win him back again.
She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden, had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen companion at her side.
The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.
It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping mother—a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes. Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then, as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.
Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth—where had Lynette seen them before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it up and kissed it soundly.
"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are mother and nurse?"
"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows, and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of having no other engagement so absorbing.
Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen.... She ran up the steep side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon Saxham's heart so heavily.