Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/205

Rh could see that she had been engaged in clipping streamers of wild grape from the hedge which half screened her. She still held a pair of rusty-looking rose shears in her fingers.

He no longer studied the garden, with its sundial slightly awry and its unused fountain and its shadowed turf-slope and ragged paths edged with perennials. It was the girl that held his attention, and oddly enough, his first vague feeling of depression slipped away from him. Just what lay at the root of that depression he could not have said. But he felt so like a wanderer into regions of desolation touched with mystery that the opening lines of Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came kept recurring to his mind. And it struck him as odd that he should spot a figure so vivid in a background so dolorous. For the girl's eyes were a cornflower blue, made deeper in color by the thickly planted black lashes. Her hair, which even the abundant hood of the sunbonnet could not altogether hide, was a burnished mahogany brown. Yet her face itself, which struck