He groaned.
“Miserable beast that I am!”
“No, no, you are tired, you are not yourself. Come with me, come with me, lie in my arms—and rest.”
He turned and buried his face in the warmth of her bosom.
“Thank God you were awake,” he said.
CHAPTER VII
Roxton, that little red town under a June sky, looked like a ruby strung upon the silver thread of a river and set in a green hollow of the hills. As yet the enterprising builder had not stamped the mark of the beast glaringly upon the place, and the quaint outreachings of the town were suffered to dwindle through its orchards into the June meadows, where the deep grass was slashed and webbed with gold. The hills above were black with pine thickets that took fire with many a dawn and sunset, and to the north great beech-woods hung like purple clouds across the blue.
The most miserly of mortals might have warmed with the ridge view from Marley Down. Southward a violet haze of hills, larch-woods golden spired in glimmering green valleys, bluff knolls massive with many oaks, waving fields, blue smoke from a few scattered cottages. From Marley Down with its purple heather billowing between the pine woods like some Tyrian sea, the road curled to the red town sleeping amid its meadows.
Mrs. Betty Steel was at least an æsthetician, and her eyes roved pleasurably over the woods and valleys as she drove in her smart dog-cart over Marley Down. She had been ridding her conscience of a number of belated country “calls” with a friend, Miss Gerratty, beside her, a plump little person in a pink frock. There was a certain cottage on Marley Down that Betty Steel had coveted for months, an antique gem, oak panelled, brick floored, with great brown beams across the ceilings. Betty Steel had the woman’s greed for the possession of pretty things. The house in St. Antonia’s Square seemed too large and cumbersome for her at times. Perhaps it was something of a mausoleum, holding the ashes of a dead desire. Often she wearied of it and the endless domestic details, and longed for some nook where her restless individualism could live in its own atmosphere.
A glazier was tinkering at one of the cottage casements when Mrs. Betty drove up the grass track between sheets of glowing gorse. A pine wood backed the cottage on the west; in front, before the little lawn, a white fence linked up two banks of towering cypresses. Mrs. Betty drew rein before the gate, and called to the man who was releading the casement frames.