y sat, were growing numbers of
little mountain pinks, with fringed edges and the sweetest scent
imaginable; and she got up presently to gather them. But he stayed where
he was, and odd sensations stirred in him. The blue of the sky, the
feathery green of the larch-trees, the mountains, were no longer to him
what they had been early that morning.

She came back with her hands full of the little pinks, spread her fingers
and let them drop. They showered all over his face and neck. Never was
so wonderful a scent; never such a strange feeling as they gave him.
They clung to his hair, his forehead, his eyes, one even got caught on
the curve of his lips; and he stared up at her through their fringed
petals. There must have been something wild in his eyes then, something
of the feeling that was stinging his heart, for her smile died; she
walked away, and stood with her face turned from him. Confused, and
unhappy, he gathered the strewn flowers; and not till he had collected
every one did he get up and shyly take them to her, where she still
stood, gazing into the depths of the larch-wood.

V

What did he know of women, that should make him understand? At his
public school he had seen none to speak to; at Oxford, only this one. At
home in the holidays, not any, save his sister Cicely. The two hobbies of
their guardian, fishing, and the antiquities of his native county,
rendered him averse to society; so that his little Devonshire
manor-house, with its black oak panels and its wild stone-walled park
along the river-side was, from year's end to year's end, innocent of all
petticoats, save those of Cicely and old Miss Tring, the governess.
Then, too, the boy was shy. No, there was nothing in his past, of not
yet quite nineteen years, to go by. He was not of those youths who are
always thinking of conquests. The very idea of conquest seemed to him
vulgar, mean, horrid. There must be many signs indeed before it would
come into his head that a woman was in love with him, especially the one
to whom he looked up, and thought so beautiful. For before all beauty he
was humble, inclined to think himself a clod. It was the part of life
which was always unconsciously sacred, and to be approached trembling.
The more he admired, the more tremulous and diffident he became. And so,
after his one wild moment, when she plucked those sweet-scented blossoms
and dropped them over him, he felt abashed; and walking home beside her