Page:The Trespasser, Lawrence, 1912.djvu/164

156 She strayed into the thick grass, a sturdy white figure that walked with bent head, abstract, but happy.

“What is she thinking?” he asked himself. “She is sufficient to herself—she doesn’t want me. She has her own private way of communing with things, and is friends with them.”

“The dew has been very heavy,” she said, turning, and looking up at him from under her brows, like a smiling witch.

“I see it has,” he answered. Then to himself he said: “She can’t translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can’t render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not indispensable….”

The lane led up to the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and white flowers brilliant with dew.

A stout man in an alpaca jacket and panama hat was seated on the bare lawn, his back to the sun, reading a newspaper. He tried in vain to avoid the glare of the sun on his reading. At last he closed the paper and looked angrily at the house—not at anything in particular.

He irritably read a few more lines, then jerked up his head in sudden decision, glared at the open door of the house, and called: