She rose quickly, and stretched her hand appealingly toward him. A mastering impulse of tenderness filled his heart at her words of regret. Before he knew, he had pressed her hand in a quick kiss against his lips, and then stood holding it fast, awestruck at what he had done.
“Oh! What are you doing?” cried Mrs. Farrell, starting away from him in a panic. “Don’t; you mustn’t! Mr. Easton! Oh dear, there’ll be somebody coming in a moment!” She wrung her hand loose and, casting one look of fear, wonder, and reproach upon him, turned and walked sadly away. He followed her as silently, and without a word they mounted the slope of the hollow, and passed through the brakes and over the walls, which she mounted now without his help. When they came to the last, which divided the wood from the open meadow, she turned her aggrieved face upon him again and said, meekly: “I shall have to beg you to go back and get me those ferns we left there in the hollow. It won’t do to go home without anything. I’ll wait here;” and she sat down upon the low broken wall, and averted her face from him again. He went back as he was bidden, and with a little search found the place, the sight of which somehow sent a shiver through him as if it were haunted, and, gathering up the clusters of ferns, returned with them to her. He tried to say something, but could not. She took some of them, and began to talk in a curiously animated way, looking at them and comparing them; and then, not far off, he saw Gilbert and the young girls approaching. Mrs. Farrell sprang down from the wall and hurried to meet them. They were covered with brakes and ferns and a gay laughing and talking broke forth among the women. Mrs. Farrell attached Gilbert to her for the walk home; and it fell to Easton to accompany the two young girls. When he left them they said he was very nice-looking, and he was very hard to get along with, much harder than Mr. Gilbert, who always kept saying something to make you laugh. They did not know whether Mr. Easton was really stupid or not; he did not look stupid, and it was quite delightful to have a man so bashful.
In the meantime he had parted in a blank, opaque sort of way from Mrs. Farrell, with whom he left Gilbert, and was walking moodily homeward over that road where he had met her in the morning. He found the hotel intolerable, and after a cup of its Japan tea, and a glance at its hot biscuit, its cold slices of corned beef, its little blocks and wedges of cheese, its small satellite dishes of prunes and preserves, and its twenty-five Sunday evening toilettes, he went out again, and walked far and long in a direction that he knew nothing of except that it was away from where he had spent the day. His heart was still thickly beating in his ears when he got back and found Gilbert alone on the piazza.
“Hello!” said Gilbert. “Developing into a pedestrian? Why did you go away so soon? I think the lovely Farrell missed you. She was quite pensive and distraite at first; though I must own she cheered up and collected herself after a while. She looked extremely attractive in her melancholy.”
Easton sat down in the next chair without answering, and, drawing a match along the bottom of the seat, lighted his cigar. After a few whiffs he took it from his lips and held it till it went out.
Gilbert went on with a quick laugh, “She’s a most amusing creature!”
“I don’t understand what you mean by that,” said Easton, turning his face halfway toward his friend, in a fashion he had.
“Well, it’s hard to say. I suppose because she’s so deep and so transparent. She does everything for an effect, and she isn’t at peace with herself for a moment.”
“I suppose we all do that,” commented Easton.
“Yes, but not with her motive.”