They were not far from Redpale now. The sunset was creeping over the sky--only the east before them was dark, banked high with thundery vapour. Nigel could still hear Tony speaking, as if in a kind of dream. His thoughts were busy elsewhere.
"Won't you?" repeated Tony for the second time.
"Go back to London, and make yourself famous."
"But I do--and so will you when you're not so unhappy. Now, to please me, won't you promise to go back to London and make yourself a great career? You and I used to be friends once--I hope we're friends still--and I shall always be interested in everything you do. I expect to see your name in a very high place some day. Now, for my sake, promise to go back."
They had stopped a moment to rest her foot. Nigel lifted his eyes from the grass and looked into hers--wondering. Was it true, was it even possible, that she had never seen his love? She could not, or she would not speak like this--"For my sake." After all, she would never expect him to dare ... that would blind her to much that might have betrayed him had he been worthier. No, she had not seen his love, and she had never loved him. She had never loved any man but Quentin Lowe--he was her first love, he had lit the first flame in her heart, and that heart was his, in all its purity and burning.
Standing there beside her in the sunset, her weight resting deliciously on him as she raised her injured foot from the ground, he realised the change that had come to Tony. Her manner was as entirely different from her manner of six months ago at Shovelstrode as that had been different from the manner of those still earlier days at Lingfield or Brambletye. In those days, during their playtime, Tony had been a school-girl, a delightful hoyden, the best pal and fellow-adventurer a man could have. In December, in the garden at Shovelstrode, she had lost that valiant girlhood, and at the same time her womanhood was unripe--she had been a crude mixture of girl and woman, sometimes provokingly both, sometimes repellingly neither. But to-day she was woman complete. Both her mind and her body seemed to have stepped out of their green adolescence. There was a certain dignity of curve about the tall figure resting against him, which Nigel had not seen in the forest or in the garden; there was a clear and confident look in the eyes which in earlier days had been either wistful or timid; there was a heightened colour on the cheeks. Her manner was full of gentle assurance, her speech easy and sympathetic--as utterly different from the crude tactlessness of Christmastide as from the school-girl rattle of November.