Miss Culpepper had sat down again at the piano, and was striking a few chords now and then, in an absent-minded way. She was by no means a pretty girl in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Her face was a good one, without being strikingly handsome. She had something of her father’s shrewd, keen look, but with an underlying expression of goodness and kindliness, difficult to define, but unmistakably there. She had large blue-gray eyes and magnificent teeth. Her complexion, lily-clear during the winter months, was already freckled by the warm May sunshine, and would be more so before the summer was over. Finally, her hair was red—not auburn, but an unmistakable red.
But Tom Bristow had rather a weakness for red hair—not perhaps for the deep, dull, fiery red which we sometimes see. He accepted it, as the old Venetians accepted it—as one of the rarest types of beauty, as something far superior to your commonplace browns and blacks. And then he did not object to freckles—in moderation. He looked upon them as one of the signs of a sound country-bred constitution. As Jane Culpepper sat there by the piano, in the sunny May eventide, in her white dress, trimmed with pale green velvet, with her red hair coiled in great hands round her little head—with her frank smile, and her clear honest-looking eyes, she filled up in Tom’s mind his ideal picture of a healthy, pure-minded English country girl, and it struck him that he could have made a very pleasant water-colour sketch of herself and her surroundings.
Jane spared him the trouble of finding a topic that would be likely to interest her by being the first to speak. “Do you find Duxley much changed since you were here last?” She asked.
“Very little changed indeed. These small country towns never do change, or only by such imperceptible degrees that one never notices the difference. But may I ask, Miss Culpepper, how you know that I am not a stranger to Duxley?”
“Oh, I have often heard papa speak of you, and wonder what had become of you.”
“And heard him blame me, I doubt not, for running away from the friends of my youth, and the town of my birth.”
“I cannot say that you are altogether wrong,” answered Jane with a smile. “Papa is a little impulsive at times, as I dare say you know, and judges every one from his own peculiar standpoint.”
“Which means, in my case, I suppose, that because I was born in Duxley, I ought to have earned my bread there, died there, and been buried there.”
“Something of the kind, doubtless. Old-fashioned prejudices you would call them, Mr. Bristow.”
“I dare say I should. But they are worthy of respect for all that.”