Owen, the gardening man, is helping them; they are combining business with pleasure; fruit-picking with persiflage. How loudly and shrilly they laugh! and yet loud, shrill laughter expresses mirth and cause for mirth, as well as low and silvery. Esther, grave and alone, catches herself wondering what the joke was that caused such general merriment two minutes ago. Probably, did she know it, she would not laugh at it, would see no point in it, perhaps, but she would be glad to hear it. The huckaback is thick and heavy; bending down one's head over one's work sends all the blood in one's body into it. Phew! How hot! How much pleasanter to be out of doors, tweaking off dead rose heads, watching the great red poppies straightening out their folded creases, pulling the green nightcaps off the escholtzia buds! A shadow darkens the French window, causing Miss Craven to give one of those starts that make one feel as if one literally jumped out of one's skin, and fill one with ungodly wrath against the occasion of them.
"I rang several times," says Robert Brandon, apologetically, "but nobody came."
"Oh! it's you, is it?" she says, with a tone not exactly of rapture in her voice; "our servants always manage to be out of the way on the rare occasions when any one calls. They are all in the garden, picking currants; one would have been plenty, but they prefer working, like convicts or navvies, in gangs."
"I came to see whether you were inclined to take a walk?" he says, hesitatingly, for her manner is not encouraging.
"Too hot!" she answers, lazily, leaning her head on the back of her chair, and closing her eyes, as if his presence disposed her to sleep.
"Not in the wood?" he rejoins, eagerly. "Under our oaks it is as cool and almost as dark as night, and there is always a breeze from the brook."
"I am busy!" she says, pettishly, annoyed at his persistence, and taking in with a dissatisfied eye his tout ensemble—yellow beard, frayed coat-sleeves, vigorous rustic comeliness.
He does not pursue the subject further, but stands leaning wistfully and uncertain against the window.
"Jack is not at home, I'm afraid," she says, stiffly, by-and-by.
"I did not come to see Jack," he answers, bluntly. She does not invite him to come in, but he, crossing the threshold diffidently, takes a seat near, but not aggressively near, her. "Don't let me interrupt you!" he says, deprecatingly.
She takes him at his word, and continues her homely occupation. Up and down, up and down her foot goes, keeping the wheel in motion; prick, prick, prick, the needle travels with its quick, regular stabs. If, as I have said, the process of bending over work on a July afternoon is heating, the consciousness that another person is watching every quiver of your eyelids, counting every breath you draw, and every displaced hair that straggles about brow or cheek, does not conduce to make it less so. The magnetic influence that sooner or later compels the eyes of the looked at to seek those of the looker, obliges Esther, after awhile, to raise hers—reluctant and protesting—to Robert's.
"I wish my mother could see you!" he says, with a smile of placid happiness. Mr. Brandon carries his mother metaphorically upon his back, almost as much as pious Æneas did the old Anchises literally. Esther suspends her employment for a moment.
"I beg your pardon; this machine makes such a noise that I did not catch what you said."
"I was only wishing that mother could see you now."
"It is a pleasure she enjoys pretty frequently. Why now particularly?"
"She would see how thrifty and housewifely you can be."
"I am glad she does not, then," answers the girl, drily, beginning to work again faster than ever, and flushing with annoyance; "she would form a most erroneous estimate of me. I dislike particularly to be found by people in one of my rare paroxysms of virtue; they take it for my normal state, and judge and expect of me accordingly."
"I shall tell her that, at all events, my judgment of you was nearer the truth than hers," says Robert, triumphantly.
Esther laughs awkwardly.
"I don't know whether you are aware of it, but you are conveying to my mind the idea that your mother has been pronouncing a very unfavourable verdict upon me and my character."
"She thinks you are too pretty and lively, and—and—" (frivolous had been the word employed by Mrs. Brandon, but Robert cannot find it in his heart to apply it to his idol)—"too fond of society to care about being useful in tame, humdrum, everyday ways."
Esther gives her head a little impatient shake.
"Mrs. Brandon adheres to the golden axiom, so evidently composed by some one to whom beauty was sour grapes, that it is better to be good than pretty; an axiom that assumes that the one is incompatible with the other."
So speaking she relapses into a chafed silence, and he into his vigilant dumb observation of her. At the end of a quarter of an hour, as he still shows no signs of moving, finding the present position of affairs no longer tolerable, Miss Craven jumps up, flings down her heap of huckaback on the floor, and says abruptly, with a sort of forced resignation:
"I will come to the wood, if you wish; it will be all the same a hundred years hence."
"I am perfectly happy as I am," he answers with provoking good humour, looking up in blissful unconsciousness at her charming cross face, and the plain yet dainty fit of her trim cheap gown.
"But I am not," she rejoins brusquely; "indoors it is stifling to-day; please introduce me as quickly as possible to that breeze you spoke of; I have not been able to find a trace of one all day."
She fetches her hat and puts it on; too indifferent as to her appearance in his eyes to take the trouble of casting even a passing glance at herself in the glass, to see whether it is put on straight or crooked.
The Glan-yr-Afon wood is a fickle, changeable place; like a vain woman, it is always taking off one garment and putting on another. Three months ago, when the April woods were piping to it, it had on a mist-blue cloak of hyacinths—what could be prettier?—but now it has laid it aside, and is all tricked out in gay grass, green, flecked here and there with rosy families of catch-fly and groups of purple orchis spires. Do you remember those words of the sweetest, wildest, fancifullest of all our singers?
"And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
That led through this garden along and across—
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees—
"Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow'rets that, drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glowworm from the evening dew."
They describe Glan-yr-Afon wood much better than I can. It is a great green cathedral, where choral service goes on all day long, and where the rook preaches impressive sermons from the swinging tree-tops.
"Had we not better walk arm in arm?" asks Esther, sardonically, as they march along in silence. "I believe it is the correct thing on these occasions; at least Gwen and her
