rst step that had cost. John's assurance was coming swiftly
back. Her own air of perfect ease in the circumstances very likely
accelerated it. "Yes," he answered her. "But surely that isn't a reason
for begrudging it a word of praise?"

By this he was lucky enough to provoke a laugh, a little light gay
trill, sudden and brief like three notes on a flute.

"No," she admitted. "You are right. The day deserves the best we can say
of it."

"Her voice," thought John, availing himself of a phrase that had struck
him in a book he had lately read, "her voice is like ivory and white
velvet." And the touch, never so light, of a foreign accent with which
she spoke, rendered her English piquant and pretty,--gave to each
syllable a crisp little clean-cut outline. They sauntered on for a
minute or two in silence, with half the width of the road-way between
them, the shaded road-way, where the earth showed purple through a thin
green veil of mosses, and where irregular shafts of sunlight, here and
there, turned purple and green to red and gold. The warm air, woven of
garden-fragrances, hung round them palpable, like some infinitely
subtile fabric. And of course blackbirds were calling, blackcaps and
thrushes singing, in all the leafy galleries overhead. A fine day
indeed, mused John, and indeed worthy of the best that they could say.
His nervousness, his excitement, had entirely left him, his assurance
had come completely back; and with it had come a curious deep
satisfaction, a feeling that for the moment at any rate the world left
nothing to be wished for, that the cup of his desire was full. He didn't
even, now that he might do so, wish to talk to her. To walk with her was
enough,--to enjoy her companionship in silence. Yes, that was
it--companionship. He caught at the word. "That is what I have been
unconsciously needing all along. I flattered myself that I was
luxuriating in the very absence of it. But man is a gregarious animal,
and I was deceived." So he could refer the effect of her propinquity to
the mere gregarious instinct, not suspecting that a more powerful
instinct was already awake. Anyhow, his sense of that propinquity,--his
consciousness of her, gracefully moving beside him in the sweet weather,
while her summery garments fluttered, and some strange, faint, elusive
perfume was shaken from them,--filled him with a satisfaction that for
the moment seemed ultimate. He had no wish to talk. Their progress side
by side w