Her name was Nona.
Out of a hundred people who passed her by quite a
considerable number would have denied that she was
beautiful. Her face was round and saucy rather
than oval and classical. Incontestable the striking
attraction of her complexion and of her hair; but
not beautiful,—quite a number would have
said, and did say. Oh, no; pretty, perhaps, in
a way, but that’s all.
But her face was much more than beautiful to Sabre.
Until this moment, standing there with his bicycle,
she on her beautiful horse, he had not seen her, nor
Lord Tybar, for two years. They had been travelling.
Now seeing her, thus unexpectedly and thus gallantly
environed, his mind, with that astonishing precision
of detail and capriciousness of selection with which
the mind retains pictures, reproduced certain masculine
discussion of her looks at a time when, as Nona Holiday
of Chovensbury Court, daughter of Sir Hadden Holiday,
M.P. for Tidborough, she had contributed to local
gossip by becoming engaged to Lord Tybar.
“Pretty girl, you know,” masculine discussion
had said; and Sabre had thought, “Fools!”
“Oh, hardly pretty,” others had maintained;
and again “Fools!” he had thought.
“Pretty—pretty! Hardly
pretty—hardly—!” Furious, he
had flung away from them.
The time and the place of the discussion had been
when the news of her engagement had just been brought
into the clubhouse of the Penny Green Golf Club.
He had flung out into the rain which had caused the
pavilion to be crowded. Fools! Was she pretty!
Did they mean to say they couldn’t see in her
face what he saw in her face? And then he thought,
“But of course they haven’t loved her.
It’s nothing to them what they’ve only
just heard, but what she told me herself this morning....
And she knew what it meant to me when she told me....
Although we said nothing. Of course I see her
differently.”
He saw her “differently” now after two
years of not seeing her, and ten years since that
day of gossip at the golf club. Pretty!...
Strange how he could always remember that smell of
the rain as he had come out of the clubhouse ... and
a strange fragrance in the air as now he looked upon
her.
Upon the warm and trembling air, as he stood with
his bicycle before the horses, were borne to him savour
of hay newly turned in the fields about, and of high
spring-tide blowing in the hedgerows; and with them
delicious essence from the warm, gleaming bodies of
the horses, and pungent flavour of the saddlery, and
the mare’s sweet breath puffed close to his
face in little gusty agitations.
The shining, tingling picture of strength and beauty
superbly modelled that the riders and their horses
made, seemed, as it were, to arise out of and be suspended
shimmering in the heart of the warm incense that he
savoured. So when a sorcerer casts spiced herbs
upon the flame, and scented vapour uprises, and in
the vapour images appear.
