There burst from Philip the exclamation, “Good Lord!”
“One would never believe it,” said Miss Abbott, flushing. “He looks much older.”
“And is he good-looking?” he asked, with gathering sarcasm.
She became decisive. “Very good-looking. All his features are good, and he is well built—though I dare say English standards would find him too short.”
Philip, whose one physical advantage was his height, felt annoyed at her implied indifference to it.
“May I conclude that you like him?”
She replied decisively again, “As far as I have seen him, I do.”
At that moment the carriage entered a little wood, which lay brown and sombre across the cultivated hill. The trees of the wood were small and leafless, but noticeable for this—that their stems stood in violets as rocks stand in the summer sea. There are such violets in England, but not so many. Nor are there so many in Art, for no painter has the courage. The cart-ruts were channels, the hollow lagoons; even the dry white margin of the road was splashed, like a causeway soon to be submerged under the advancing tide of spring. Philip paid no attention at the time: he was thinking what to say next. But his eyes had registered the beauty, and next March he did not forget that the road to Monteriano must traverse innumerable flowers.
“As far as I have seen him, I do like him,” repeated Miss Abbott, after a pause.
He thought she sounded a little defiant, and crushed her at once.
“What is he, please? You haven’t told me that. What’s his position?”
She opened her mouth to speak, and no sound came from it. Philip waited patiently. She tried to be audacious, and failed pitiably.
“No position at all. He is kicking his heels, as my father would say. You see, he has only just finished his military service.”
“As a private?”
“I suppose so. There is general conscription. He was in the Bersaglieri, I think. Isn’t
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