She was splendidly tall, and had bronze brown hair, with a glint of gold when the sun shone on it. The sun was shining on it now, through a gap in the thinning trees that overhung the glen, and with the leaves pattering over her head, and the river running at her feet, it was almost as if she herself were singing.
With her spare hand she was holding up her dress, which was partly of lace—light and loose and semi-transparent—and when a breeze, which was blowing from the sea, lapped it about her body there was a hint of the white, round, beautiful form beneath. Her eyes were dark and brilliantly full, and her face was magnificently intellectual, so clear-cut and clean. And yet she was so feminine, so womanly, such a girl!
She must have heard Stowell's footsteps, and perhaps his singing as he approached, for she turned to look up at him—calmly, rather seriously, a little anxiously but without the slightest confusion. And he looked at her, pausing to do so, without being quite aware of it, and feeling for one brief moment as if wind and water had suddenly stopped and the world stood still.
There was a moment of silence, in which he felt a certain chill, and she a certain warmth, and both a certain dryness at the throat. The girl was the first to recover self-control. Her face sweetened to a smile, and then, in a voice that was a little husky, and yet sounded to him like music, she said, as if she had asked and answered an earlier question for herself:
"But of course you don't know who I am, do you?"
He did. Although she was so utterly unlike what he had expected (what he had told himself he expected) he knew—she was Fenella Stanley.
As often as he thought of it afterwards he could never be quite sure what he had said to her in those first moments. He could only guess at what it must have been by his vivid memory of what she had said in reply.
She watched him, womanlike, for a moment longer, to see what impression she had made upon him, now that she knew what impression he had made upon her. Then she glanced down at her bare feet, that looked yellow on the pebbles in the running water, and then at her shoes and stockings, which, with her parasol, lay on the bank, and said:
"I suppose you ought to go away while I get out of this?"
"Why?"