The Woman Who Did | Page 8

would pay her his promised visit. As he appeared at the
rustic gate in the privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed color with pleasure
when she saw him push it open.
"Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon!" she cried, jumping from her seat (with just
a glance at the glass) and strolling out bareheaded into the cottage garden. "Isn't this a
charming place? Only look at our hollyhocks! Consider what an oasis after six months of
London!"
She seemed even prettier than last night, in her simple white morning dress, a mere
ordinary English gown, without affectation of any sort, yet touched with some faint
reminiscence of a flowing Greek chiton. Its half-classical drapery exactly suited the
severe regularity of her pensive features and her graceful figure. Alan thought as he
looked at her he had never before seen anybody who appeared at all points so nearly to
approach his ideal of womanhood. She was at once so high in type, so serene, so tranquil,
and yet so purely womanly.
"Yes, it IS a lovely place," he answered, looking around at the clematis that drooped from
the gable-ends. "I'm staying myself with the Watertons at the Park, but I'd rather have this
pretty little rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italian terraces. The
cottagers have chosen the better part. What gillyflowers and what columbines! And here
you look out so directly on the common. I love the gorse and the bracken, I love the
stagnant pond, I love the very geese that tug hard at the silverweed, they make it all seem
so deliciously English."

"Shall we walk to the ridge?" Herminia asked with a sudden burst of suggestion. "It's too
rare a day to waste a minute of it indoors. I was waiting till you came. We can talk all the
freer for the fresh air on the hill-top."
Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick better, and he said so at once. Herminia
disappeared for a moment to get her hat. Alan observed almost without observing it that
she was gone but for a second. She asked none of that long interval that most women
require for the simplest matter of toilet. She was back again almost instantly, bright and
fresh and smiling, in the most modest of hats, set so artlessly on her head that it became
her better than all art could have made it. Then they started for a long stroll across the
breezy common, yellow in places with upright spikes of small summer furze, and pink
with wild pea-blossom. Bees buzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang
shrill from the sand-banks. Herminia's light foot tripped over the spongy turf. By the top
of the furthest ridge, looking down on North Holmwood church, they sat side by side for
a while on the close short grass, brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the cropped
sward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs stretching away towards Reigate.
Tender grays and greens melted into one another on the larches hard by; Betchworth
chalk-pit gleamed dreamy white in the middle distance. They had been talking earnestly
all the way, like two old friends together; for they were both of them young, and they felt
at once that nameless bond which often draws one closer to a new acquaintance at first
sight than years of converse. "How seriously you look at life," Alan cried at last, in
answer to one of Herminias graver thoughts. "I wonder what makes you take it so much
more earnestly than all other women?"
"It came to me all at once when I was about sixteen," Herminia answered with quiet
composure, like one who remarks upon some objective fact of exernal nature. "It came to
me in listening to a sermon of my father's,--which I always look upon as one more
instance of the force of heredity. He was preaching on the text, 'The Truth shall make you
Free,' and all that he said about it seemed to me strangely alive, to be heard from a pulpit.
He said we ought to seek the Truth before all things, and never to rest till we felt sure we
had found it. We should not suffer our souls to be beguiled into believing a falsehood
merely because we wouldn't take the trouble to find out the Truth for ourselves by
searching. We must dig for it; we must grope after it. And as he spoke, I made up my
mind, in a flash of resolution, to find out the Truth for myself about everything, and never
to be deterred from seeking it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by any
convention or preconception. Then he went on to say how the Truth