HEIR first meeting was in the long gallery among the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum. Enthusiast though he was, he was tired, as human souls are tired, with the cold reserve of carved stone—the imperturbable mystery of these old kings and gods who had kept for thousands of years, amid the shifting sands of the desert, their immemorial secrets. His eyes ached with the close scrutiny of minute and delicate detail. Then suddenly his eyes rested on her, fair and laughing and full of the joy of life, and his soul rejoiced because there was still youth in the world, and secrets that no kings and gods had power to keep from the sons of men who walk the earth to-day.
She came along the gallery between two other girls, but he did not see these as living creatures—only as dark figures against the light of her presence. It was not till they three were close to him that he became aware of her, and looked up. Their eyes met and stayed together in a look that lasted a very long time—almost half a minute. She came up quite close to him, always with those others that did not count, and then abruptly, the three turned to the right and the swing doors of the refreshment room vibrated behind them.
Then he tried to analyze that look of hers—not bold or provocative, yet with no timidity, no bashfulness, no self-consciousness. It was the look of one who trusts the world and thinks well of it. Many girls nowadays have that frank, fearless look. The qualities which made the look a thing worth analyzing were two: its length and a singular quality of recognition. Did she know him? Had he ever met her before? No, he could not have forgotten her. He lingered in the gallery till she and her companions came back through the swing doors. This time she had no eyes for him. He sauntered slowly the way they went, noted all down the Roman gallery the grace of her free gait, saw her disappear into the reading-room, and went home.
His home was in Kent, and he was going to say good-bye to it for awhile—for next week he started for the East, to watch, under cloudless skies, paid and uninterested workers scraping at the earth to bring to light such cold witnesses to old faith and loyalty and love as lined the gallery where he had met her.
The last days were full. His father who stayed at home and wrote the books for which Neville gathered the materials, had many last words to say. Also his type-writing girl had gone off ill, and there was a delay in getting another. So Neville spent a good many hours in the work secretaries are paid for. Also his aunt, who adored him, wanted his opinion on the new Dutch garden that was now a bit of meadow beyond the orchard, and was to be a blaze of formal beauty when he came home again.
"You'll think about that mass of yellow tulips and forgetmenots when you are boiling your brains in Egypt," she said.
"I'm not imaginative enough," he told her. "I shall see the old garden as I always do, and the rose arches all red and pink and yellow, and my nice aunt snipping off the dead flowers with a pair of rusty scissors."
"Aren't there any flowers out there?" she asked.
"Oh, yes, cactus flowers, but they're not pleasant to pick. It's difficult to believe that spring really will come again, isn't it? when one sees the brown bare trees and the heaps of dead leaves."
"But all the flowers are there under the leaves," said the aunt; "and spring really will come again."
The aunt was right. Spring did come again. And with its coming came Neville Underwood from the dry East. He sent his luggage up from the station in the dog cart that came to meet him, and he himself walked up through the woods in the splendor of one of those afternoons when May takes the rôle of July and plays the part perfectly.
The beeches were thick with bright light leaves, the elms were fully dressed; only the oaks stood almost bare. The undergrowth of hazel and sweet chestnut was thick and fresh. Through its moving green the sun made a golden haze and the shadows of the leaves danced on a pathway that was all green grass and glad little thriving wild weeds.
"Dear God; but it's good to see green woods again," he said.
And it was here, among the woods, that he met her the second time. In the middle of that wood is a carrefour, an open space of bright fine grass, and from it four broad green rides run, straight as arrows, dip and dwindle and grow invisible with distance. The ground is green, the undergrowth is green and the new fronds of bracken and the trees overhead. And in all this green a note of deep blue is likely to take the eye of the gazer.