ADDED PEARLS
The days which followed were golden days to Jane.There was nothing to spoil the enjoyment of a very new and strangely sweet experience.
Garth's manner the next morning held none of the excitement or outward demonstration which had perplexed and troubled her the evening before.He was very quiet, and seemed to Jane older than she had ever known him.He had very few lapses into his seven-year-old mood, even with the duchess; and when someone chaffingly asked him whether he was practising the correct deportment of a soon-to-be-married man, "Yes," said Garth quietly, "I am.""Will she be at Shenstone?" inquired Ronald; for several of the duchess's party were due at Lady Ingleby's for the following week-end.
"Yes," said Garth, "she will."
"Oh, lor'!" cried Billy, dramatically."Prithee, Benedict, are we to take this seriously?"But Jane who, wrapped in the morning paper, sat near where Garth was standing, came out from behind it to look up at him and say, so that only he heard it "Oh, Dal, I am so glad! Did you make up your mind last night?""Yes," said Garth, turning so that he spoke to her alone, "last night.""Did our talk in the afternoon have something to do with it?""No, nothing whatever."
"Was it THE ROSARY?"
He hesitated; then said, without looking at her: "The revelation of THE ROSARY? Yes."To Jane his mood of excitement was now fully explained, and she could give herself up freely to the enjoyment of this new phase in their friendship, for the hours of music together were a very real delight.Garth was more of a musician than she had known, and she enjoyed his clean, masculine touch on the piano, unblurred by slur or pedal; more delicate than her own, where delicacy was required.
What her voice was to him during those wonderful hours he did not express in words, for after that first evening he put a firm restraint upon his speech.Under the oaks he had made up his mind to wait a week before speaking, and he waited.
But the new and strangely sweet experience to Jane was that of being absolutely first to some one.In ways known only to himself and to her Garth made her feel this.There was nothing for any one else to notice, and yet she knew perfectly well that she never came into the room without his being instantly conscious that she was there; that she never left a room, without being at once missed by him.His attentions were so unobtrusive and tactful that no one else realised them.They called forth no chaff from friends and no "Hoity-toity!
What now?" from the duchess.And yet his devotion seemed always surrounding her.For the first time in her life Jane was made to feel herself FIRST in the whole thought of another.It made him seem strangely her own.She took a pleasure and pride in all he said, and did, and was; and in the hours they spent together in the music-room she learned to know him and to understand that enthusiastic beauty-loving, irresponsible nature, as she had never understood it before.
The days were golden, and the parting at night was sweet, because it gave an added zest to the pleasure of meeting in the morning.And yet during these golden days the thought of love, in the ordinary sense of the word, never entered Jane's mind.Her ignorance in this matter arose, not so much from inexperience, as from too large an experience of the travesty of the real thing; an experience which hindered her from recognising love itself, now that love in its most ideal form was drawing near.
