To-day Janet was not sure how she could arrange a meeting. Meetings with Quentin generally needed the most careful planning, and on this occasion he had not given her much time. However, she thought, the boys would very probably go shooting in the early evening, and she could then run over to Furnace Wood.
This was what happened. A little manœuvring sent Nigel and Leonard out to pot rabbits, and a minute or so later Janey stole from Sparrow Hall, climbing the gate opposite into the fields of Wilderwick. She did not wear a hat—she never did—and over her dress was a disreputable old jacket. She went gaily and innocently to meet her lover in garments many women would not have swept the floor in.
It was a long tramp to Furnace Wood. The rain had cleared, but the grass was wet, and the trees shook down rain-drops and wet leaves. Autumn was late that year, still in the fiery stage—whole hedges flamed, and backgrounds were mostly yellow. But everywhere now were the dead leaves, damp as well as dead. Her feet splashed through them, they caked her boots, they filled every corner with their smell of sweet rottenness.
Furnace Wood marked the beginning of the chain of hammer ponds below Holtye Common. For a long time the fields had been sloping eastward, till at last they dropped into a tangled valley stretching from Old Surrey Hall to Sweetwoods Farm. Here was a great stillness and a great solitude—woods, and thick old orchards, with now and then an oast-house or a chimney struggling up among them. In this valley lay Redpale Farm, Clay Farm, and Scarlet Farm, all old, alone, forsaken, beside the gleaming hammer ponds.
The waters of the first pond flashed like a shield through the half-naked branches of Furnace Wood. Janet's quick eyes saw Quentin standing by the hedge, and she began to run. She splashed over the drenched field, climbed the hedge with an agility she owed to a total disregard for her clothes—and crept warm and panting into his arms, as he stood there among the drifted leaves.
"Janey," he whispered, kissing her lips and her hair and her wrist wet with rain, "how I love you ... little Janey sweet."
It pleased Quentin to call her little, though as a matter of fact she was considerably taller than he. Quentin was a few years younger than Janey—delicate-looking, and yet thick-set. His face was pale, though the features were roughly hewn, and his shoulders were so high as to give him almost the appearance of a hunchback. In spite of this, he often struck people as handsome in a strange way—which was due, perhaps, to a certain nobility in the casting of his face, with its idealistic mouth, strong nose, and great bright eyes, which seemed to be burning under his heavy brows.
"Janey," he continued, "you're beautiful to-day—you're part of the evening. There's rain on your hair, and on your cheek, so that when I kiss it I taste rain—you're brown and red, just like the fields, you're windswept and rumpled like the woods."
Janey laughed.