All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of her hand.

“But, Nettie!  I came over to talk to you?”

“My dear boy!  Tea first, if you please!  And besides—­aren’t we talking?”

The “dear boy” was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.

She quickened her pace a little.

“I wanted to explain—­” I began.

Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so.  I said a few discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than her words.

When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in her urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to the garden.  She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish eyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now I know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glanced over me and behind me towards the shrubbery.  And all the while, behind her quick breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.

Her dress marked the end of her transition.

Can I recall it?

Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use.  But her bright brown hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail tied with a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an intricacy of pretty curves above her little ear and cheek, and the soft long lines of her neck; her white dress had descended to her feet; her slender waist, which had once been a mere geographical expression, an imaginary line like the equator, was now a thing of flexible beauty.  A year ago she had been a pretty girl’s face sticking out from a little unimportant frock that was carried upon an extremely active and efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs.  Now there was coming a strange new body that flowed beneath her clothes with a sinuous insistence.  Every movement, and particularly the novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirts she gathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had come to her, called softly to my eyes.  A very fine scarf—­I suppose you would call it a scarf—­of green gossamer, that some new wakened instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung now closely to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed fluttering out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy independent tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary contact with my arm.

She caught it back and reproved it.

We went through the green gate in the high garden wall.  I held it open for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted stock of stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near touching me.  So we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the head gardener’s cottage and the vistas of “glass” on our left.  We walked between the box edgings and beds of begonias and into the shadow of a yew hedge within twenty yards of that very pond with the gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so we came to the wistaria-smothered porch.