CHAPTER XI

THE YEAR’S FRUIT

Spring had slipped into summer, summer had given place again to winter, and once more April was come, with her soft breath blowing upon the sticky green buds and bidding them open, whilst daffodils and tulips, like slim sentinels, swayed above the brown earth, in a riot of tender colour.

There is something very fresh and charming about London in April.  The parks are aglow with young green, and the trees nod cheerfully to the little breeze that dances round them, whispering of summer.  Even the houses perk up under their spruce new coats of paint, while every window that can afford it puts forth its carefully tended box of flowers.  It is as though the old city suddenly awoke from her winter slumber and preened herself like a bird making its toilet; there is an atmosphere of renewal abroad—­the very carters and cabmen seem conscious of it, and acknowledge it with good-humoured smiles and a flower worn jauntily in the buttonhole.

Diana leaned far out of the open window of her room at Brutton Square, sniffing up the air with its veiled, faint fragrance of spring, and gazing down in satisfaction at the delicate shimmer of green which clothed the trees and shrubs in the square below.

The realisation that a year had slipped away since last the trees had worn that tender green amazed her; it seemed almost incredible that twelve whole months had gone by since the day when she had first come to Brutton Square, and she and Bunty had joked together about the ten commandments on the wall.

The year had brought both pleasure and pain—­as most years do—­pleasure in the friends she had gathered round her, Adrienne and Jerry and Bunty—­even with Olga Lermontof an odd, rather one-sided friendship had sprung up, born of the circumstances which had knit their paths together—­pain in the soreness which still lingered from the hurt that Errington had dealt her.  Albeit, her life had been so filled with work and play, her mind so much occupied, that a surface skin, as it were, had formed over the wound, and it was only now and again that a sudden throb reminded her of its existence.  Love had brushed her with his wings in passing, but she was hardly yet a fully awakened woman.

Nevertheless, the brief episodes of her early acquaintance with Errington had cut deep into a mind which had hitherto reflected nothing beyond the simple happenings of a girlhood passed at a country rectory, and the romantic flair of youth had given their memory a certain sacred niche in her heart.  Some day Fate would come along and take them down from that shelf where they were stored, and dust them and present them to her afresh with a new significance.

For a brief moment Errington’s kiss had roused her dormant womanhood, and then the events of daily life had crowded round and lulled it asleep once more.  In swift succession there had followed the vivid interest of increasing musical study, the stirrings of ambition, and a whole world of new people to meet and rub shoulders with.