Читать книгу Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs - R. D. Blackmore - Страница 23

“I should think that you were the very kindest darling, and I should ask you to breathe it quite into my ear—‘Hilary, Hilary!’—just like that; and then I should answer just like this, ‘Mabel, Mabel, sweetest Mabel, how I love you, Mabel!’ and then what would you say, if you please?”

“I should have to ask my mother,” said the maiden, “what I ought to say. But luckily the whole of this is in your imagination. Mr. Lorraine, you have lost your strawberries by your imagination.”

“What do I care for strawberries?” Hilary cried, as the quick girl wisely beat a swift retreat from him. “You never can enter into my feelings, or you never would run away like that. And I can’t run after you, you know, because of Phyllis and Gregory. There she goes, and she won’t come back. What a fool I was to be in such a hurry! But what could I do to help it? I never know where I am when she turns those deep rich eyes upon me. She never will show them again, I suppose, but keep the black lashes over them. And I was getting on so well—and here are the stalks of the strawberries!”

Of every strawberry she had eaten from his daring fingers he had kept the stalk and calyx, breathed on by her freshly fragrant breath, and slyly laid them in his pocket; and now he fell to at kissing them. Then he lay down in the Carolinas, where her skirt had moved the leaves; and to him, weary with strong heat, and a rush of new emotions, comfort came in the form of sleep. And when he awoke, in his open palm most delicately laid he found a little shell-shaped cabbage-leaf piled with the fruit of the glossy neck.

[1] That admirable writer, Dr. Hogg.