“Oh, I can understand that perfectly,” she said, nodding her curly head with a great air of wisdom. “Well, I’ll come and see you again. Aren’t you really going to eat that apple?”
Mr. Sheridan laughed, and tossed it back to her.
“There you are, Eve. Like Adam, I’d be much better without it.”
With the agility of a monkey, Jane, holding the apple between her teeth, swung herself lightly and easily to the ground. A little later Mr. Sheridan saw the curly auburn head and the green sweater moving up the hill, and with the feeling that he would very much like to be going in the same direction, toward that busy little town—yes, in the very same direction of that human society which he had resolved to shun—he turned away.
He had already begun to doubt his wisdom in allowing this slight infringement of the iron rule of seclusion he had resolved to follow. Already he felt very little inclined to spend the rest of the morning going over the battalions of musty volumes in the Major’s library, as he had planned,—his idea had been to bury his sorrows in grave bookishness. Already he found himself possessed by a desire to venture out beyond the security of his garden. And if he had followed Janey up the hill, if he had seen her stop for a few moments, at the gate of the house on the left hand side, to report to a demure and shocked and vastly interested young lady on various features of her late venture, he would have felt that all his doubts on the wisdom of allowing anything feminine within thirty yards of him, were more than justified.
Jane lay on her stomach, stretched out comfortably on the window-seat in Granny’s room, her elbows propped on a cushion, her chin in her hands and a book open on another cushion. The light was already waning, for the days were growing perceptibly shorter, and furthermore the afternoon had been dark and stormy. A driving autumn rain pattered steadily against the window, drummed on the roof, gushed from the drain pipes, and angrily stripped the branches of the trees of their gaudy foliage. Now, only the stark black boughs creaked in the wind; here and there one stubborn brown leaf still clung to a twig, but you could see the whole lead grey sky clearly, and the irregular outlines of glistening roofs.