er, crossed
ankles in brown silk hose, and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk
ties. She drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a
straying lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his
caressing voice:

"Take off the other glove, too."

She was well aware how beautiful her hands were--small, and slender, and
ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with little babyish nicks at the
wrists, and at the inner edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails,
of the true almond shape. She thought little of her face, though she knew
it to be charming; but she ingenuously admired her slender feet, that were
quite as pretty without the silk stockings and little brown shoes, and the
delicate hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with ardent
longing, and said:

"How dear of you to do that, because I asked you! And do you realise that
we're here together alone, you and me, for the first time? Nobody saw us
steal away but Sister Cleophee, and I've a notion she wouldn't tell,
blessed old soul!"

Her eyes smiled.

"You would not call the Mother that?"

"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a
snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a
snubbing from the Royalty."

"The Princess never snubbed you?"

"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had
sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing
her round St. Paul's. And--acting as Extra Equerry--I'd got instructions
to call her a hack conveyance, and--being young and downy, I'd picked
H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born
here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there
won't be one left in London."

"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler
is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."

"You sweetest!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I knew all that you
could teach me!"

He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her
then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the grass,
leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in
with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her,
delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her
to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her
in waves