All the while Philippa stood looking out of the window over the tree tops, her young heart and brain on fire with happiness and throbbing with the wonder of her first innocent passion.
With it, for the first time, had come something she never before had known with Warner—something indefinite, new, inexplicable—a vague sense of shyness almost painful at instants—a consciousness of herself that she had never known—a subtle, instinctive realization of her own maturity which left a faintly delicious sensation in her breast.
Now, for the first time since she had known him, her instinct was not to go to him, not to face him. She did not understand why—did not question herself. From the window she looked out over the forest; she heard him moving quietly about behind her; listened with an odd content in his proximity, but with no desire to turn and join him—no wish to move or stir from the spell which held her there in the enchanted silence of a happiness so wonderful that sky and earth seemed to understand and share it with her.
"Philippa?"
She turned slowly as in a dream.
It was perhaps as well that he had a record on canvas of what she had been—of the young girl he had been painting in all her lovely immaturity. Perhaps the girl who faced him now from the window was even lovelier, but she was not the Philippa of "Philippa Passes."
Truly that Philippa had passed, vanished silently even as she had stood there with her eyes on the window; faded, dissolved into thin shadow, leaving, where she had stood, this slender, silent, deep-eyed girl looking at him out of the new and subtle mystery which enveloped her.
He thought that it was he himself who saw her differently and with new eyes; but she herself had changed. And, for the first time, as they passed slowly toward the terrace together, he was conscious of a freshness that seemed to cling to her like a fragrance—and of the beauty of her as she moved beside him, not touching him, keeping clear of contact, her head a trifle bent.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Warner, dressing for dinner, stood looking down from his window at the Saïs road. Halkett, in his smart but sober field uniform, sat sideways on the window sill, chatting with his friend and surveying the lively panorama below, where, through the fading light, endless columns of motor lorries rolled ponderously eastward.