he said no more, and they
walked together, she looking at the ground, he at the soft brown hair
blowing over the curve of her young cheek. She was fine and delicate in
every line, and in her color, and in the touch of her too, Young Gerard
knew. He wanted to touch her cheek with his finger as he would have
touched the petal of a flower. Her neck, the back of it especially, was
one of the loveliest bits of her, like a primrose stalk. He fell a step
behind so that he could look at it. They did not speak as they went. He
did not want to, and she did not know what to say.

When they reached the shed she lingered a moment by the tree, tracing a
bare branch with her finger, and he waited, content, till she should
speak or act, to watch her. At last she said with her faint smile, "I
am very thirsty." Then he went into the shed and came out with his
wooden cup filled with milk. She drank and said, "Thank you, shepherd.
How pretty the violets are in your copse."

"Would you like some?" he asked.

"Not now," she said. "Perhaps another day. I must go now." She gave him
back his cup and went away, slowly at first, but when she was at some
distance he saw her begin to run like a fawn.

She did not come again that spring. And so the stark lives of the boy
and the tree went forward for another year. But one evening in the
following April, when the green was quivering on wood and hedgerow, he
came to the door of the shed and saw her bending like a flower at the
edge of the copse, filling her little basket and singing to herself.
She looked up soon and said:

"Good evening, shepherd. How does your cherry-tree?"

"As usual, Mistress Thea."

"So I see. What a lazy tree it is. Have you some milk for me?"

He brought her his cup and she drank of it for the third time, and left
him before he had had time to realize that she had come and gone, but
only how greatly her delicate beauty had increased in the last year.

However, before the summer was over she came again--to swim in the
river, she told him, as she passed him on the hills, without lingering.
And in the autumn she came to gather blackberries, and he showed her
the best place to find them. Any of these things she might have done as
easily nearer Combe Ivy, but it seemed she must always offer him some
reason for her small truancies--whether to gather berries or flowers,
or to swim in the river. He knew that her chief delight lay in escaping
from her father's manor.

Winter