As for the day itself, it also advanced by steady steps to its climax, unfolding its beauties like a perfect flower. The fresh, rain-washed morning drifted into a warm, languorous noon, followed by an afternoon so long and golden that it seemed to hold within itself the flower and sun, shade and perfume, of a whole summer. Tredennis had never known so long an afternoon, he thought, and yet it was only lengthened by the strange delight each hour brought with it, and was all too short when it was over. It seemed full of minute details, which presented themselves to his mind at the time as discoveries. Bertha worked upon her lace, and he watched her, waiting for the moment when she would look up at him, and then look down again with a quick or slow droop of the lids, which impressed itself upon him as a charm in itself. There was a little ring she wore which made itself a memory to him,--a simple turquoise, which set upon the whiteness of her hand like a blue flower. He saw, with a new sense of recognition, every fold and line of her thin, white drapery, the slight, girlish roundness of her figure, the dashes of brightness in the color of her hair, the smallness of the gold thimble on her finger, her grace when she rose or sat down, or rested a little against the red cushions in her hammock, touching the ground now and then with her slender slipper and swaying lightly to and fro. "Do you know," he said to her once, as he watched her do this, "do you know,"--with absorbed hesitation,--"that I feel as if--as if I had never really seen you until to-day--until this afternoon. You seem somehow to look different." "I am not sure," she answered, "that I have ever seen you before; but it is not because you look different." "Why is it?" he asked, quite ready to relinquish any idea of his own in the pursuit of one of hers. She looked down a moment. "To-day," she said, "I don't think you have anything against me." "You think," he returned, "that I have usually something against you?" "Yes," she answered. "Will you tell me what you think it is?" "I do not need to tell you," she said. "You know so well--and it would rather hurt me to put it into words." "Hurt you?" he repeated. "I should be harder than I am," she returned, "if it had not hurt me to know it myself--though I would not tell you that at any other time than now. I dare say I shall repent it to-morrow," she said. "No," he answered, "you won't repent it. Don't repent it." He felt the vehemence of his speech too late to check it. When he ended she was silent, and it was as if suddenly a light veil had fallen upon her face, and he felt that, too, and tried to be calmer. "No," he repeated, "you must not repent. It is I who must repent that I have given you even a little pain. It is hard on me to know that I have done that."