She looked at her reflection shyly as though she had surprised a strange girl. But the strange shyness gave way to a strange interest in that figure before her. She seemed to have acquired an interest in her body from her head to her feet such as she had never known before, and she found herself actually posing before the glass. Only for a minute, however; with a little laugh that had something of maidenly merriment in it and the rest of maidenly passion, she flung her hair away from her figure and rushed to her bed.
She did not go to sleep for a long time. The window of her room was open and she could hear faintly the notes of the nightingale that was singing in a plantation beyond the orchard.
And somehow the song of the nightingale also seemed quite new to her. She could not understand how it was that she had ever thought of it as sad.
She turned rosy when he asked her if she would pay his mother a visit, and she did not answer him at once.
"Did you tell your mother who I am--what I am?" she enquired, without looking at him.
"And are you sure that she wishes to see me?"
He did not answer at once. At last he said,
"I don't think that she wants particularly to see you. She doesn't care a great deal for seeing strangers. But I wish her to see you, and I wish you to see her."
"In the ordinary course of life I should not pay your mother a visit," she said. "I know my place."
He laughed at the humour of her demureness, and she laughed because he was laughing; but only for a second.
"There's nothing to laugh at," she said. "I made a plain statement. In the ordinary course of life social visits are not exchanged between the ladies of the Manor and the girls of the farm; but in this case, and if you will save me the trouble of explaining how it is that I go... and yet I don't know that you can explain it or that I can explain it... oh, you had better not try to explain anything."
"Is there anything to explain?" he asked.
"There is a great deal to explain, but nothing that can be explained," she replied. "I will be pleased to pay Mrs. Wingfield a visit. That's all that need be said on the matter. I am sure that she will be very nice to me, and I know that I will be as nice to her as I can be to any one. Haven't I always been nice to you?"