‘Will you go and find him?’ said she, with intense propriety in her looks and tone.
‘I will,’ said Loveday reluctantly; and he went.
Anne stood still. She could now escape her gallant friend, for, although the distance was long, it was not impossible to walk home. On the other hand, Loveday was a good and sincere fellow, for whom she had almost a brotherly feeling, and she shrank from such a trick. While she stood and mused, scarcely heeding the music, the marching of the soldiers, the King, the dukes, the brilliant staff, the attendants, and the happy groups of people, her eyes fell upon the ground.
Before her she saw a flower lying—a crimson sweet-william—fresh and uninjured. An instinctive wish to save it from destruction by the passengers’ feet led her to pick it up; and then, moved by a sudden self-consciousness, she looked around. She was standing before an inn, and from an upper window Festus Derriman was leaning with two or three kindred spirits of his cut and kind. He nodded eagerly, and signified to her that he had thrown the flower.
What should she do? To throw it away would seem stupid, and to keep it was awkward. She held it between her finger and thumb, twirled it round on its axis and twirled it back again, regarding and yet not examining it. Just then she saw the trumpet-major coming back.
‘I can’t find David anywhere,’ he said; and his heart was not sorry as he said it.
Anne was still holding out the sweet-william as if about to drop it, and, scarcely knowing what she did under the distressing sense that she was watched, she offered the flower to Loveday.
His face brightened with pleasure as he took it. ‘Thank you, indeed,’ he said.
Then Anne saw what a misleading blunder she had committed towards Loveday in playing to the yeoman. Perhaps she had sown the seeds of a quarrel.
‘It was not my sweet-william,’ she said hastily; ‘it was lying on the ground. I don’t mean anything by giving it to you.’