Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/220

210 an intense-eyed girl with mahogany-tinted hair.

So two days later, when he parked his car in the deep shadow of a horse-chestnut beside the Lake Road, he felt that luck was with him when he caught sight of a lilac sunbonnet on the far side of the half-strangled cedar hedge. Yet his heart skipped a beat as he pushed open the broken gate, and in stepping though it seemed to step back a century in time.

The girl, who had a garden rake in her hand, paled a little as she caught sight of him.

"It was good of you to come back," she said quite simply. But that acknowledgment seemed enriched by the look of intensity on her face. It was a look, he was beginning to see, which was habitual with her, and had much to do with her persistent aura of childishness.

"I call it good of you to let me," he protested. Yet his eyes, as he spoke, were on the faded front of the old manor-house.

"They didn't understand," she said with her childlike immediacy.