They looked after the two women with eyes that clung charmed to the figure of Mrs. Farrell, as she drifted down the sloping meadow-path.
“Magnificent!” said the dark man, carelessly. “‘A daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair!’”
A flush came over the cheek of the other, but he said nothing, while he absently advanced to the rock beside which the women had been sitting, as if that superb shape had drawn him thus far after her. A little book lay there, which he touched with his foot before he saw it. As he stooped to pick it up, Mrs. Farrell stopped fleetly, as a deer stops, and, wheeling round, went rapidly back toward the two men. When Mrs. Farrell advanced upon you, you had a sense of lustrous brown eyes growing and brightening out of space, and then you knew of the airy looseness of the overhanging hair and of the perfection of the face, and last of the sweeping, undulant grace of the divine figure. So she came onward now, fixing her unfrightened, steadfast eyes upon the young man, out of whose face went everything but worship. He took off his hat, and bent forward with a bow, offering the pretty volume, at which he had hardly glanced.
“Thanks,” she breathed, and for an instant she relaxed the severe impersonality of her regard, and flooded him with a look. He stood helpless, while she turned and swiftly rejoined her companion, and so he remained standing till she and Rachel had passed through the meadow bars and out of sight.
Then the dark man moved and said, solemnly, “Don’t laugh, Easton; you wouldn’t like to be seen through, yourself.”
“Laugh, Gilbert?” retorted Easton, with a start. “What do you mean? What is there to laugh at?” he demanded.
“Nothing. It was superbly done. It was a stroke of genius in its way.”
“I don’t understand you,” cried Easton.
“Why, you don’t suppose she left it here on purpose, and meant one of us to pick it up, so that she could come back and get it from him, and see just what manner of men we were; and—”
“No! I don’t suppose that.”