“Why do they come here?  It’s still young and warm and good out here.  Why don’t they keep to their Culture, where no one knows what it is to ache and feel hunger, and hearts don’t beat.  Feel!”

Disturbed beyond measure, the boy could not tell whether it was in her heart or in his hand that the blood was pulsing so.  Was he glad or sorry when she let his hand go?

“Ah, well!  They can’t spoil this day.  Let’s rest.”

At the edge of the larch-wood where they sat, were growing numbers of little mountain pinks, with fringed edges and the sweetest scent imaginable; and she got up presently to gather them.  But he stayed where he was, and odd sensations stirred in him.  The blue of the sky, the feathery green of the larch-trees, the mountains, were no longer to him what they had been early that morning.

She came back with her hands full of the little pinks, spread her fingers and let them drop.  They showered all over his face and neck.  Never was so wonderful a scent; never such a strange feeling as they gave him.  They clung to his hair, his forehead, his eyes, one even got caught on the curve of his lips; and he stared up at her through their fringed petals.  There must have been something wild in his eyes then, something of the feeling that was stinging his heart, for her smile died; she walked away, and stood with her face turned from him.  Confused, and unhappy, he gathered the strewn flowers; and not till he had collected every one did he get up and shyly take them to her, where she still stood, gazing into the depths of the larch-wood.

V

What did he know of women, that should make him understand?  At his public school he had seen none to speak to; at Oxford, only this one.  At home in the holidays, not any, save his sister Cicely.  The two hobbies of their guardian, fishing, and the antiquities of his native county, rendered him averse to society; so that his little Devonshire manor-house, with its black oak panels and its wild stone-walled park along the river-side was, from year’s end to year’s end, innocent of all petticoats, save those of Cicely and old Miss Tring, the governess.  Then, too, the boy was shy.  No, there was nothing in his past, of not yet quite nineteen years, to go by.  He was not of those youths who are always thinking of conquests.  The very idea of conquest seemed to him vulgar, mean, horrid.  There must be many signs indeed before it would come into his head that a woman was in love with him, especially the one to whom he looked up, and thought so beautiful.  For before all beauty he was humble, inclined to think himself a clod.  It was the part of life which was always unconsciously sacred, and to be approached trembling.  The more he admired, the more tremulous and diffident he became.  And so, after his one wild moment, when she plucked those sweet-scented blossoms and dropped them over him, he felt abashed; and walking home beside her he was quieter than ever, awkward to the depths of his soul.