"Yes—since you won't go for your own."
They had stopped a moment to rest her foot. Nigel lifted his eyes from the grass and looked into hers—wondering. Was it true, was it even possible, that she had never seen his love? She could not, or she would not speak like this—"For my sake." After all, she would never expect him to dare ... that would blind her to much that might have betrayed him had he been worthier. No, she had not seen his love, and she had never loved him. She had never loved any man but Quentin Lowe—he was her first love, he had lit the first flame in her heart, and that heart was his, in all its purity and burning.
Standing there beside her in the sunset, her weight resting deliciously on him as she raised her injured foot from the ground, he realised the change that had come to Tony. Her manner was as entirely different from her manner of six months ago at Shovelstrode as that had been different from the manner of those still earlier days at Lingfield or Brambletye. In those days, during their playtime, Tony had been a school-girl, a delightful hoyden, the best pal and fellow-adventurer a man could have. In December, in the garden at Shovelstrode, she had lost that valiant girlhood, and at the same time her womanhood was unripe—she had been a crude mixture of girl and woman, sometimes provokingly both, sometimes repellingly neither. But to-day she was woman complete. Both her mind and her body seemed to have stepped out of their green adolescence. There was a certain dignity of curve about the tall figure resting against him, which Nigel had not seen in the forest or in the garden; there was a clear and confident look in the eyes which in earlier days had been either wistful or timid; there was a heightened colour on the cheeks. Her manner was full of gentle assurance, her speech easy and sympathetic—as utterly different from the crude tactlessness of Christmastide as from the school-girl rattle of November.
Yes, Tony was a woman come into her kingdom, proud, sweet, compassionate and strong. Quentin Lowe had made her this in the short weeks of his love. Unworthy little cad as he was, he had yet been able to raise her from girlhood to womanhood, to crown her with the diadem of her heritage....
"Tony," cried Nigel, caught in a sudden storm of impulse, "do you love Quentin Lowe?"
"Love him!—why, of course.... Let's move on."
"You're not angry with me?—I have my reason for asking."
"No, I'm not angry. But what reason can you have?"
"I remember," said Nigel desperately, "what you told me six months ago. You said you couldn't forgive...."