her hand.

"But, Nettie! I came over to talk to you?"

"My dear boy! Tea first, if you please! And besides--aren't we
talking?"

The "dear boy" was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.

She quickened her pace a little.

"I wanted to explain--" I began.

Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so. I said a few
discrepant things that she answered rather by her intonation than
her words.

When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in
her urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to
the garden. She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish
eyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now
I know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glanced
over me and behind me towards the shrubbery. And all the while,
behind her quick breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.

Her dress marked the end of her transition.

Can I recall it?

Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use. But her bright