She wore a Leghorn garden-hat, tied
with pink ribbons under her chin, and in her morning freshness and
daintiness she looked about seventeen. The hours of sleep had calmed the
restlessness of the wide, brown eyes; they were full now of gentleness
and mirth.
"I wonder if he'll come?"
She looked up and listened. And as she did so, her eyes and sense were
seized with the beauty of the wood. The mystery of early solitary hours
seemed to be still upon it; both in the sunlight and the shadow there
was a magic unknown to the later day. In a clearing before her spread a
lake of willow-herb, of a pure bright pink, hemmed in by a golden shore
of ragwort. The splash of color gave Kitty a passionate delight.
"Dear, dear world!" She stretched out her hands to it in a childish
greeting.
Then the joy died sharply from her eyes. "How many years left--to enjoy
it in--before one dies--or one's heart dies?"
Invariably, now, her moments of sensuous pleasure ended in this dread of
something beyond--of a sudden drowning of beauty and delight--of a
future unknown and cruel, coming to meet her, like some armed assassin
in a narrow path.
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