"Philippa, I have nothing to teach you—much to learn from you. Whoever you are, you need no patronage from anybody, no allowances, no concessions, no excuses. For I never knew a cleaner, braver, sweeter character than is yours, Philippa—nor a soul more modest, more simple and sincere. What does it matter how you come by it—whether God gave it, or whether what you are has been evolved by race—by generations of gentle breeding?
"We don't know; and I, for one, don't care—except for any satisfaction or consolation it might afford you to know who you really are.
"But, for me, I have learned enough to satisfy myself. And I have never known a lovelier character than is yours, Philippa; nor a nobler one."
She continued walking beside him, clinging very tightly to one of his arms, her head lowered under its velvet bonnet.
When she looked up at last, her eyes were wet with tears; she smiled and, loosening her clasp, stretched out her hand for his handkerchief.
"The second time I have borrowed from you," she managed to say. "Do you remember—in the boat?"
He laughed, greatly relieved that the tense constraint was broken—that the tension of his own emotion was relaxed. For he had become intensely serious with the girl—how serious and how deeply in earnest he now began to realize. And whether his own ardent tribute to her had awakened him, while offering it, to all that he was praising, or whether he had already discovered by cooler research all that he now found admirable in her, he did not know.
They came to a hedge; she returned his handkerchief, placed her hand in his, mounted the stile with lithe grace, and he climbed up beside her.
Below them ran the Ausone road, grey with hanging dust; and through the floating cloud tramped the fugitives from the north—old men, old women, girls, little children, struggling onward under their burdens, trudging doggedly, silently southward.
Philippa uttered an exclamation of pity as a man passed wheeling a crippled child in a wheelbarrow, guiding it carefully along beside a herd of cattle which seemed very difficult to manage.