Frank laid by his oars, and as regardless as a shopboy of observers, he took her hand and begged of her to confide in him. He thought, too, of seeing her daily, hourly, of her presence in his daily life; he saw her amid his painting and poetry, and this pleasant scenery. Then the vision vanished like the shine upon the stream, she withdrew her hands, a shadow had fallen.
They passed a summer-house where three girls were sitting; one sat on the edge of a table and sang the ballad of “Biddy Malone.” There was a house so red, and so full of gables and narrow windows, that Frank said it was a perfect specimen of Elizabethan architecture; and he treated Lizzie to all he could pretend to know on the subject, and he condemned the owner for the glaringly modern garden benches with which the swards were interspersed. The sun was setting, there was lassitude in every passing boat, the girls leaned upon the arms of the young men, and the woods stood up tall and contemplative, as beautiful in the deep blue river as upon the pale sky.
They landed at Pangbourne Woods by the wide grassy path between the reedy river and the spreading beeches. There a man was boiling a kettle. He spoke to them; he instructed them in the life of camping out, and he invited them to tea. Lizzie went into the tent and got out the tea-things. Two men came up, jolly fellows enough; and such little adventures endeared and memorised the day.
They climbed, oh! what a climb it was, Lizzie's ankles and courage giving way alternately; but at last they reached a pathway, and they walked at ease into the green solitudes of the wood. It seemed endless, so soft and so still. He spoke to Lizzie, whom he now called Liz, of her past, of the reasons that had led her to leave home and “go to business.” Her brother, she said, was a painter, a celebrated bird-painter.
“Then we should know each other, I am a painter.” He told her of his ideas and projects, of how he had been to France; he might go there again, unless something happened to keep him in England. He wrote a little too, in the papers, and he might do something to help her brother--a paragraph in _Fashion_, he could get one in. For fear of wounding her he did not ask if her brother was a decorative painter, employed by a firm, or an artist who exhibited pictures. Her father had married again. She did not like her stepmother, and that had determined her to go into business.