.

"Walked!" In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens.
I MUST be tired. I must come home with her at once and sit down.
Indeed it was near tea-time (the Stuarts had tea at the old-fashioned
hour of five). Every one would be SO surprised to see me. Fancy
walking! Fancy! But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen
miles. When COULD I have started!

All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of
her hand.

"But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you?"

"My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides--aren't we
talking?"

The "dear boy" was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.

She quickened her pace a little.

"I wanted to explain--" I began.

Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than
her words.

When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in
her urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to
the garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish
eyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now
I know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glanced
over me and behind me towards the shrubbery. And all the while,
behind her quick breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.

Her dress marked the end of her transition.

Can I recall it?

Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright
brown hair, which had once flowed down her back in a jolly pig-tail
tied with a bit of scarlet ribbon, was now caught up into an
intricacy of pretty curves above her little ear and cheek, and the
soft long lines of her neck; her white dress had descended to her
feet; her slender waist, which had once been a mere geographical
expression, an imaginary line like the equator, was now a thing
of flexible beauty. A year ago she had been a pretty girl's face
sticking out from a little unimportant frock that was carried upon
an extremely active and efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs.
Now there was coming a strange new body that flowed beneath her
clothes with a sinuous insistence. Every movement, and particularly
the novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirts she
gathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had come
to her, called softly to my eyes. A very fine scarf--I suppose you
would call it a scarf--of green gossamer, that some new wakened
instinct had told her to fling abou