“I don’t wear it,” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “But you don’t know what I may do some day! And for Miss Sibson, it does not matter, Mr. Flixton, what she wears. She has one of the kindest hearts, and was one of the kindest friends I had—or could have had—when things were different with me.”
“Oh, yes, good old girl,” he rejoined, “but snubby! Bitten my nose off two or three times, I know. And, come now, not quite an angel, you know, Miss Mary!”
“Well,” she replied, smiling, “she is not, perhaps, an angel to look at. But——”
“She can’t be! For she is not like you!” he cried. “And you are one, Miss Mary! You are the angel for me!” looking at her with impassioned eyes. “I’ll never want another nor ask to see one!”
His look frightened her; she began to think he meant—something. And she took a new way with him. “How singular it is,” she said, thoughtfully, “that people say those things in society! Because they sound so very silly to one who has not lived in your world!”
“Silly!” Flixton replied, in a tone of mortification; and for a moment he felt the check. He was really in love, to a moderate extent; and on the way to be more deeply in love were he thwarted. Therefore he was, to a moderate extent, afraid of her. And, “Silly?” he repeated. “Oh, but I mean it, so help me! I do, indeed! It’s not silly to call you an angel, for I swear you are as beautiful as one! That’s true, anyway!”
“How many have you seen?” she asked, ridiculing him. “And what coloured wings had they?” But her cheek was hot. “Don’t say, if you please,” she continued, before he could speak, “that you’ve seen me. Because that is only saying over again what you’ve said, Mr. Flixton. And that is worse than silly. It is dull.”
“Miss Mary,” he cried, pathetically, “you don’t understand me! I want to assure you—I want to make you understand——”
“Hush!” she said, cutting him short, in an earnest whisper. And, halting, she extended a hand behind her to stay him. “Please don’t speak!” she continued. “Do you see them, the beauties? Flying round and round the tree after one another faster than your eyes can follow them. One, two, three—three squirrels! I never saw one, do you know, until I came here,” she went on, in a tone of hushed rapture. “And until now I never saw them at play. Oh, who could harm them?”
He stood behind her, biting his lip with vexation; and wholly untouched by the scene, which, whether her raptures were feigned or not, was warrant for them. Hitherto he had had to do with women who met him halfway; who bridled at a compliment, were alive to an équivoque, and knew how to simulate, if they did not feel, a soft confusion under his gaze. For this reason Mary’s backwardness, her apparent unconsciousness that they were not friends of the same sex, puzzled him, nay, angered him. As she stood before him, a hand still extended to check his advance, the sunshine which filtered through the beech leaves cast a soft radiance on her figure. She seemed more dainty, more graceful, more virginal than aught that he had ever conceived. It was in vain that he told himself, with irritation, that she was but a girl after all. That, under her aloofness, she was a woman like the others, as vain, passionate, flighty, as jealous as other women. He knew that he stood in awe of her. He knew that the words which he had uttered so lightly many a time—ay, and to those to whom he had no right to address them—stuck in his throat now. He wanted to say “I love you!” and he had the right to say it, he was commissioned to say it. Yet he was dumb. All the boldness which he had exhibited in her presence in Queen’s Square—where another had stood tongue-tied—was gone.