large and brilliant, and yet so delicately finished in every detail beneath their perfect brows, and the curve of the lips over the small white teeth, stood out as if they had been painted on ivory by a miniature-painter of the Renaissance.  Her white dress, according to the prevailing fashion, was almost low—­as children’s frocks used to be in the days of our great-grandmothers.  It was made with a childish full bodice, and a childish sash of pale blue held up the rounded breast, that rose and fell with her breathing, beneath the white muslin.  Pale blue stockings, and a pair of white shoes, with preposterous heels and pointed toes, completed the picture.  The mingling, in the dress, of extreme simplicity with the cunningest artifice, and the greater daring and joie de vivre which it expressed, as compared with the dress of pre-war days, made it characteristic and symbolic:—­a dress of the New Time.

Geoffrey lay on the grass beside her, feasting his eyes upon her—­discreetly.  Since when had English women grown so beautiful?  At all the weddings and most of the dances he had lately attended, the brides and the debutantes had seemed to him of a loveliness out of all proportion to that of their fore-runners in those far-off days before the war.  And when a War Office mission, just before the Armistice, had taken him to some munition factories in the north, he had been scarcely less seized by the comeliness of the girl-workers:—­the long lines of them in their blue overalls, and the blue caps that could scarcely restrain the beauty and wealth of pale yellow or red-gold hair beneath.  Is there something in the rush and flame of war that quickens old powers and dormant virtues in a race?  Better feeding and better wages among the working-classes—­one may mark them down perhaps as factors in this product of a heightened beauty.  But for these exquisite women of the upper class, is it the pace at which they have lived, unconsciously, for these five years, that has brought out this bloom and splendour?—­and will it pass as it has come?

Questions of this kind floated through his mind as he lay looking at Helena, melting rapidly into others much more peremptory and personal.

“Are you soon going up to Town?” he asked her presently.  His voice seemed to startle her.  She returned evidently with difficulty from thoughts of her own.  He would have given his head to read them.

“No,” she said hesitatingly.  “Why should we?  It is so jolly down here.  Everything’s getting lovely.”

“I thought you wanted a bit of season!  I thought that was part of your bargain with Philip?”

“Yes—­but”—­she laughed—­“I didn’t know how nice Beechmark was.”

His sore sense winced.

“Doesn’t Philip want you to go?”

“Not at all.  He says he gets much more work done in Town, without Mrs. Friend and me to bother him—­”

“He puts it that way?”

“Politely!  And it rests him to come down here for Sundays.  He loves the riding.”