She let go her hold of the twig, and the red-and-gold flower danced up like a flame.
“It belongs to the sun and the soil; so it pleases one better than any importation.”
“An orchid is such a fairy—you can’t expect it to have a nationality,” he returned.
She stood, with her head thrown back a little, looking at the sprays that swung above the line of her lips. Her wide-brimmed hat dropped a soft shadow over the upper part of her face; her eyes shone through it with a gleam of intensely feminine sweetness, and the tender curve of her throat gave him an unreasoned throb of anticipation. In six weeks he would be married to this slender creature; it would be an excursion into the unknown, not unaccompanied by adventures. Tentatively, it might be agreeable; it would certainly be interesting. He confessed to a curiosity which was well on the way to become impatient.
“Then do you want to go and see the Dendrobium?” she asked.
“Not if you prefer to do anything else.”
“I think I would enjoy the cranes more, or the pink water-lilies. The others will understand, won’t they, that we two might like to take a little walk?”
Her coquetry, he said to himself, was preposterously pretty. They took another of the wide solitary paths that led under showery bamboos and quivering mahogany trees to where a stretch of water gave back the silence of the palms against the evening sky, and he dropped unconsciously into the stroll which is characterised everywhere as a lover’s. She glanced at him once or twice corroboratively, and said to herself that she had not been mistaken: he had real distinction—he was not of the herd. Then she picked up broad, crisp leaves with the point of her parasol and pondered while he talked of a possible walking tour in the Tyrol. Presently she broke in irrelevantly, hurriedly.
“I like to do a definite thing in a definite way: don’t you?”
“Certainly; yes, of course.”