"And now, what are you going to do?" he asked, and his voice was full of tender raillery for her lost tryst with the girl friend, and for her pretty helplessness.
"But I do!" he looked in her eyes. "You are going to be kind. Life is so cruel. You are going to help me to cheat Life and Destiny. You are going to leave your friend to the waste desolation of this place, if she comes by the next train: but she won't--she's kept at home by toothache, or a broken heart, or some little foolish ailment like that,"--he prided himself on the light touch here,--"and you are going to be adorably kind and sweet and generous, and to let me drink the pure wine of life for this one day."
Her eyes drooped. Fully inspired, he struck a master-chord in the lighter key.
"You have a basket. I have a brown paper parcel. Let me carry both, and we will share both. We'll go to Chevening Park. It will be fun. Will you?"
There was a pause: he wondered whether by any least likely chance the chord had not rung true. Then--
"Yes," she said half defiantly. "I don't see why I shouldn't--Yes."
"Then give me the basket," he said, "and hey for the green wood!"
The way led through green lanes--through a green park, where tall red sorrel and white daisies grew high among the grass that was up for hay. The hawthorns were silvery, the buttercups golden. The gold sun shone, the blue sky arched over a world of green and glory. And so through Knockholt, and up the narrow road to the meadow whose path leads to the steep wood-way where Chevening Park begins.
They walked side by side, and to both of them--for he was now wholly lost in the delightful part for which this good summer world was the fitting stage--to both of them it seemed that the green country was enchanted land, and they under a spell that could never break.
They talked of all things under the sun: he, eager to impress her with that splendid self of his; she, anxious to show herself not wholly unworthy. She, too, had read her Keats and her Shelley and her Browning--and could cap and even overshadow his random quotations.
"There is no one like you," he said as they passed the stile above the wood; "no one in this beautiful world."
"If there is anyone like you I have never met him, and oh, thank God, thank God, that I have met you now."