"Ye-es. But I like it."
"Could we be friends?"
"Yes—rather!"
He held out his hand. He was smiling—but suddenly as her hand took his, she saw the old wretched look creep into his eyes, together with something else that puzzled her. Were those tears? Did men ever cry? She found herself feeling frightened and vexed.
Nigel crimsoned with shame, and the fire of his anger licked up the tears of his weakness. The next moment he was looking at her with dry eyes—and, strange to say, from that day his childish fits of weeping troubled him less.
He and Tony turned almost mechanically down the narrow grass lane leading past Old Surrey Hall to the woods of Cowsanish. They did not speak much at first—indeed, a kind of restraint seemed established between them. Nigel wondered more than ever what had made him seek her out—this naïve, shy, rather limited little girl. All yesterday he had been struggling with a desperate need of her. He could not understand why he wanted her so; she was not nearly as sympathetic as Len and Janey, she was not so interesting, even, and yet he wanted her.
At first he had thought it was her ignorance of his past life which made her presence such refreshment—the blessed fact that with her he had a clean slate to write over. After all, though Len and Janey had forgiven, they could not forget—for them his muddled sum was only crossed out, not wiped clean. With Tony he could start afresh from the beginning, not merely where his miserable blunder ended. And yet this was not all that drew him to her. He felt deep down in his heart a subtler, more compelling attraction. What brought him to Tony was a development of the same feeling that had made him catch up the unlovely Ivy in his arms and find her sweet. It was a fragment of that strange, new part of him, which had been born in prison, and frightened Len and Janey—the child.
He could not remember that before his dark years he had felt particularly young for his age, or cared for young society; but now his heart seemed full of irrepressible torrents of youth. He wanted to be with boys and girls, to hear their shouts, to share their laughter, to join in their games—not as a "grown-up," but as one of themselves. Why did every one expect him to have grown old in prison? Sorrow does not always make old, it often makes young. It sends a man back pleading to the forgotten days of his youth, struggling to recapture them once more, and bring their carelessness into his awful care.
To-day he lost his troubles in finding grasses and leaves for Tony's collection. After a time her constraint wore off. She chattered to him about school friends, lessons and games, daring adventures and desperate scrapes. That day he found such a mood more sweet to him than any glimpse of pity or understanding she could have shown. He might want her compassion—the woman in her—sometimes, but only transiently; what he wanted most was the child in her, for it answered the sorrow-born child crying in the darkness of his heart.
They scrambled in the hedges for bloody-twig and bryony, they gathered the yellowing hazel, and bunches of strange pods. Nigel was able to tell her the names of many plants and bushes she had not known before—he was wonderfully enthusiastic, and loved to hear about the botany walks at school, and the other collections she had made, which had sometimes won prizes.