“Hello! Did you collect all these?” Hugh asked.
At his voice Ariel turned and stood, her body aurora’d by the golden stream of air and leaves behind her.
“You here? Hello, Hugh! Grandam’s driving with your mother. It’s such a day! I’ve been in the woods all the afternoon, with Persis and Nicky. Just got in.”
She moved toward him and stood by the table looking down at the flowers. Some of the gold from beyond the window had flowed into her hair. And when she looked up from the flowers Hugh saw it in her eyes too,—green gold. The woods, Wild Acres woods, beloved of Hugh, were there, shimmering, in Ariel’s eyes.
She looked her surprise at the expression on Hugh’s face before her. It was so stirred, so new. Perhaps it was to break the spell and get the familiar Hugh back again that she lifted her hands, palm upwards,—the corners of her mouth too, in that sharp delicate lift darted with light, that was her smile when she danced in the woods for Persis and Nicky—and remarked, “Spring has come.”
It had indeed. It had come rushing on a broad stream of light and poured itself along Hugh’s veins. The look in his face increased rather than diminished. But Ariel had done her best, all she knew, to relieve the intensity in Hugh’s dark eyes. Her knees began to tremble. She did not want Hugh to see that she was trembling. She would be utterly ashamed if he should see. So she sat down suddenly, on the edge of the daybed, and commenced to part the flowers from the wood loam, and from each other.
Her hands were browned by this one afternoon’s sun and air. They were narrow hands and small, with rather square-tipped, very straight fingers. Hugh recalled Joan’s hand above his own on his steering wheel. It was white and beautiful and exquisitely molded, a sculptor’s dream. But these little hands—their appeal was in their simplicity, in their graceful but inconspicuous motions, not in their form and modeling. If he should put his own hands down over them now they would be quite lost, all the magic and grace of their movements stilled away, and they would feel to him like the grubby hands of any little girl who had been out picking wild flowers in the woods.
He would put his hands down over hers. He would do that. He would find out how it felt to capture grace like a bird under one’s fingers,—perhaps to destroy it in the grasp of it and so prove it an illusion. Not real. Not actual. Not like Joan’s beauty, inescapable. He would prove that Ariel’s charm for him was something he could always control, could catch and subdue and hide away from himself, under his hand.