When Alan arrived, Herminia sat at the window by the quaintly clipped box-tree, a volume of verse held half closed in her hand, though she was a great deal too honest and transparent to pretend she was reading it.  She expected Alan to call, in accordance with his promise, for she had seen at Mrs. Dewsbury’s how great an impression she produced upon him; and, having taught herself that it was every true woman’s duty to avoid the affectations and self-deceptions which the rule of man has begotten in women, she didn’t try to conceal from herself the fact that she on her side was by no means without interest in the question how soon he would pay her his promised visit.  As he appeared at the rustic gate in the privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed color with pleasure when she saw him push it open.

“Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon!” she cried, jumping from her seat (with just a glance at the glass) and strolling out bareheaded into the cottage garden.  “Isn’t this a charming place?  Only look at our hollyhocks!  Consider what an oasis after six months of London!”

She seemed even prettier than last night, in her simple white morning dress, a mere ordinary English gown, without affectation of any sort, yet touched with some faint reminiscence of a flowing Greek chiton.  Its half-classical drapery exactly suited the severe regularity of her pensive features and her graceful figure.  Alan thought as he looked at her he had never before seen anybody who appeared at all points so nearly to approach his ideal of womanhood.  She was at once so high in type, so serene, so tranquil, and yet so purely womanly.

“Yes, it is a lovely place,” he answered, looking around at the clematis that drooped from the gable-ends.  “I’m staying myself with the Watertons at the Park, but I’d rather have this pretty little rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italian terraces.  The cottagers have chosen the better part.  What gillyflowers and what columbines!  And here you look out so directly on the common.  I love the gorse and the bracken, I love the stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug hard at the silverweed, they make it all seem so deliciously English.”

“Shall we walk to the ridge?” Herminia asked with a sudden burst of suggestion.  “It’s too rare a day to waste a minute of it indoors.  I was waiting till you came.  We can talk all the freer for the fresh air on the hill-top.”

Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick better, and he said so at once.  Herminia disappeared for a moment to get her hat.  Alan observed almost without observing it that she was gone but for a second.  She asked none of that long interval that most women require for the simplest matter of toilet.  She was back again almost instantly, bright and fresh and smiling, in the most modest of hats, set so artlessly on her head that it became her better than all art could have made it.  Then they started for a long