CHAPTER VIII

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE

In the moment in which she sprang to her feet she saw that it was not Hugon, and her heart grew calm again.  In her torn gown, with her brown hair loosed from its fastenings, and falling over her shoulders in heavy waves whose crests caught the sunlight, she stood against the tree beneath which she had lain, gazed with wide-open eyes at the intruder, and guessed from his fine coat and the sparkling toy looping his hat that he was a gentleman.  She knew gentlemen when she saw them:  on a time one had cursed her for scurrying like a partridge across the road before his horse, making the beast come nigh to unseating him; another, coming upon her and the Widow Constance’s Barbara gathering fagots in the November woods, had tossed to each a sixpence; a third, on vestry business with the minister, had touched her beneath the chin, and sworn that an she were not so brown she were fair; a fourth, lying hidden upon the bank of the creek, had caught her boat head as she pushed it into the reeds, and had tried to kiss her.  They had certain ways, had gentlemen, but she knew no great harm of them.  There was one, now—­but he would be like a prince.  When at eventide the sky was piled with pale towering clouds, and she looked, as she often looked, down the river, toward the bay and the sea beyond, she always saw this prince that she had woven—­warp of memory, woof of dreams—­stand erect in the pearly light.  There was a gentleman indeed!

As to the possessor of the title now slowly and steadily making his way toward her she was in a mere state of wonder.  It was not possible that he had lost his way; but if so, she was sorry that, in losing it, he had found the slender zigzag of her path.  A trustful child,—­save where Hugon was concerned,—­she was not in the least afraid, and being of a friendly mind looked at the approaching figure with shy kindliness, and thought that he must have come from a distant part of the country.  She thought that had she ever seen him before she would have remembered it.

Upon the outskirts of the ring, clear of the close embrace of flowering bush and spreading vine.  Haward paused, and looked with smiling eyes at this girl of the woods, this forest creature that, springing from the earth, had set its back against the tree.

“Tarry awhile,” he said.  “Slip not yet within the bark.  Had I known, I should have brought oblation of milk and honey.”

“This is the thicket between Fair View and the glebe lands,” said Audrey, who knew not what bark of tree and milk and honey had to do with the case.  “Over yonder, sir, is the road to the great house.  This path ends here; you must go back to the edge of the wood, then turn to the south”—­

“I have not lost my way,” answered Haward, still smiling.  “It is pleasant here in the shade, after the warmth of the open.  May I not sit down upon the leaves and talk to you for a while?  I came out to find you, you know.”