The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to bring.  
And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.
 
The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats—a business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath² the loud birds' singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many days like this—with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the sheltered south-west corner, were[Pg 210] the bees in any number tuning³ up their fiddles⁴.
 
I looked up from my work and saw—at that most unusual hour—Eric Annan at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd—excited. I dropped the garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.
 
"Matter? What should be the matter?"
 
I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had betrayed himself.
 
"I thought you looked as if—as if something had happened," I said. What I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the heart of man could not conceal⁵ it, or contain it, for another hour.
 
But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent⁶ down over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic⁷ green, and set them firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their roots.
 
"What are you planting there?" he asked.
 
"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last year.[Pg 211]
 
"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
 
I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He looked astonished.
 
I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I confessed the walks.
 
"You ought not to have told me," he said.
 
"Why?"
 
"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."
 
I went on planting thyme.
 
"Promise me, for these next days you won't go either."
 
"Why?" I asked again.
 
"Because my thoughts might go wandering."
 
I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.
 
"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me." He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.
 
"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next—how many days am I to be[Pg 212] cooped up when the morning is at its best?"
 
"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience⁸ of his, if you were doing other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you going to put in?"
 
"All there is," I said provokingly. ............