It was exquisite in the wood.  The light flashed on wet leaves, the birds were awaking.  A little steamer went up the satiny, dreaming surface of the river, and when Harriet walked through the village, heartening whiffs of boiling coffee and wood smoke came from the labourers’ cottages.  She was young; she could have danced with exultation in the hour and mood.  It was almost seven o’clock when she came back, glowing, beginning to feel warm and headachy, beginning to realize that the July day would be hot, beginning to be conscious of the eight-mile tramp.  In the garden at Crownlands she met Royal, leaving the house.

He studied her approvingly.

“Harriet, do you know you are extraordinarily easy to look upon?  What gets you up so early?”

“I’ve been walking,” she said, briefly and unresponsively.  His social pleasantries instantly antagonized her, and he saw it.

“Well, I thought perhaps I had better get out.  I’m at the club for a day or two.  I believe Miss Hawkes, Rosa, the eldest sister, wants me to get up a reading, the great Indian Epic Poems, something along that line.  It’s for the Red Cross, of course.”  He yawned, and smiled at the early summer sky.  “Ward tells me,” he added, giving the girl a sharp glance, “that you and he—­eh?”

Harriet flushed.

“I’m sorry he told you!”

“Oh, my dear child!” Blondin made a deprecatory motion of his hands.  “Of course, I think you’re very wise,” he added.

This smote upon her new-born self-respect, and all the glory departed from the day.  She had taken off her loose white coat, and pushed back the hat that pressed upon her thick, shining hair.  It clung in damp ringlets to the soft duskiness of forehead and temples, her cheeks glowed rosily under their warm olive, and her clouded smoke-blue eyes were averted; he could see only the thick, upcurling black lashes that fringed them so darkly.  The man saw her breast rise and fall with some quick emotion as he half-smilingly watched her.

“The lad gets a beautiful and wise and very discreet wife,” he was beginning, but Harriet silenced him angrily.

“We need not indulge in compliments, Roy!  If I marry Ward—­”

“If—?  I supposed it definite!”

“Well, when I marry him, then, it will be because I truly—–­” She paused, halted at the great word.  “Because I truly do admire and care for him,” she substituted, somewhat lamely.

“It isn’t quite a pillar of smoke by day, and of fire by night?” he suggested, quietly.  Harriet saw the words written, in the handwriting of a girl of seventeen, and had a moment of vertigo.  She attempted no answer.  “In other words, you would hardly consider him if he had his own way to make, if he had a salary of two hundred a month, like Fred Davenport!” Royal added.  “There’s a certain magic about a background of motorcars and Sherry’s, and the opera Monday nights, and the bank account, isn’t there?”