“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 hilltop.”