Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/180

THE AWKWARD AGE from an unseen alley. It set her, after a minute, into less difficult motion; she passed slowly down the steps, wandering further, looking back at the big bright house, but pleased again to see no one else appear. If the sun was still high enough she had a pink parasol. She went through the gardens one by one, skirting the high walls that were so like "collections" and thinking how, later on, the nectarines and plums would flush there. She exchanged a friendly greeting with a man at work, passed through an open door and, turning this way and that, finally found herself, in the park, at some distance from the house. It was a point she had had to take another rise to reach, a place marked by an old green bench for a larger sweep of the view, which, in the distance, where the woods stopped, showed, in the most English way in the world, the color-spot of an old red village and the tower of an old gray church. She had sunk down upon the bench almost with a sense of adventure, yet not too fluttered to wonder if it wouldn't have been happy to bring a book; the charm of which, precisely, would have been in feeling everything about her too beautiful to let her read.

The sense of adventure grew in her, presently becoming aware of a stir in the thicket below, followed by the coming into sight, on a path that, mounting, passed near her seat, of a wanderer whom, had his particular, his exceptional identity not quickly appeared, it might have disappointed her a trifle to have to recognize as a friend. He saw her immediately, stopped, laughed, waved his hat, then bounded up the slope and, brushing his forehead with his handkerchief, confessing to being hot, was rejoicingly there before her. Her own ejaculation on first seeing him—"Why, Mr. Van!"—had had an ambiguous sharpness that was rather for herself than for her visitor. She made room for him on the bench, and in a moment he was cooling off and they were both 170