Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/129

Rh "Yes," she said half defiantly. "I don't see why I shouldn't— Yes."

"Then give me the basket," he said, "and hey for the green wood!"

The way led through green lanes—through a green park, where tall red sorrel and white daisies grew high among the grass that was up for hay. The hawthorns were silvery, the buttercups golden. The gold sun shone, the blue sky arched over a world of green and glory. And so through Knockholt, and up the narrow road to the meadow whose path leads to the steep wood-way where Chevening Park begins.

They walked side by side, and to both of them—for he was now wholly lost in the delightful part for which this good summer world was the fitting stage—to both of them it seemed that the green country was enchanted land, and they under a spell that could never break.

They talked of all things under the sun: he, eager to impress her with that splendid self of his; she, anxious to show herself not wholly unworthy. She, too, had read her Keats and her Shelley and her Browning—and could cap and even overshadow his random quotations.