done nothing more than pick up and return, say, a handkerchief she might
have dropped. "You were right," he owned to his thought of Lady
Blanchemain; "she is beautiful." Here, at close quarters with her, one's
perception of her beauty became acute,--here, under the grey old trees,
in the leafy dimness, alone with her, at two paces from her, where the
birds sang and the violets gave forth their fragrant breath. He saw that
her eyes were beautiful (soft and deep and luminous, despite their
trouble), and her low white brow, and the dark masses of her hair, under
her garden-hat, and the rose in her cheeks, and the red-rose of her
mouth. And he saw and felt the beauty and the vitality of her strong
young body.

But meanwhile she had stretched forth, rather timidly, that ungloved
fair hand of hers, and taken the flowers.

"You are very good, I am sure. Thank you very much," she said, rather
faintly, with a grave little inclination of the head.

John, always with magnificent assurance, put up his hand, to doff a
man-of-the-worldy hat, and bow himself away;--and it encountered his
bare locks, bare, and still wet from recent ducking. Whereupon,
suddenly, the trifles he had forgotten were remembered, and at last (in
the formula of the criminologist) "he realized his position:" hatless
and uncombed, with the bathing-towel slung from his shoulder, in that
weather-beaten old frieze coat with its ridiculous buttons, in those
awful Turkish slippers,--offering, with his grand manner, flowers to a
woman he didn't know, and smiling, to put her at her ease! His pink
face burned to a livelier pink, his ears went hot, his heart went cold.
The bow he finally accomplished was the blighted bud of the bow he had
projected; and, as the earth didn't, of its charity, open and engulf
him, he hastened as best he could, and with a painful sense of slinking,
to remove his crestfallen person from her range of view.

When these unselfconscious fellows are startled into selfconsciousness,
I fancy they take it hard. I don't know how long it was before John had
done heaping silent curses, silent but savage, upon himself; his luck,
his "beastly officiousness," upon the whole afflicting incident: curses
that he couldn't help diversifying now and then with a catch of
splenetic laughter, as a vision of the figure he had cut would
recurrently

"--_flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude_."

"Oh, you _ape!_" he groaned. "Rigge