THE pearl of the dawn was not yet dissolved in the gold cup of the
sunshine, but in the northwest the dripping opal waves were ebbing fast
to the horizon, and the sun was already half risen from his couch of
dull crimson. She leaned out of her window. By fortunate chance it was a
jasmine-muffled lattice, as a girl's window should be, and looked down
on the dewy stillness of the garden. The cloudy shadows that had clung
in the earliest dawn about the lilac bushes and rhododendrons had faded
like grey ghosts, and slowly on lawn and bed and path new black shadows
were deepening and intensifying.
She drew a deep breath. What a picture! The green garden, the awakened
birds, the roses that still looked asleep, the scented jasmine stars!
She saw and loved it all. Nor was she unduly insensible to the charm of
the central figure, the girl in the white lace-trimmed gown who leaned
her soft arms on the window-sill and looked out on the dawn with large
dark eyes. Of course, she knew that her eyes were large and dark, also
that her hair was now at its prettiest, rumpled and tumbled from the
pillow, and far prettier so than one dared to allow it to be in the
daytime. It seemed a pity that there should be no one in the garden save
the birds, no one who had awakened thus early just that he might gather
a rose and cover it with kisses and throw it up to the window of his
pretty sweetheart. She had but recently learned that she was pretty. It
was on the evening after the little dance at the Rectory. She had worn
red roses at her neck, and when she had let down her hair she had picked
up the roses from her dressing-table and stuck them in the loose, rough,
brown mass, and stared into the glass till she was half mesmerised by
her own dark eyes. She had come to herself with a start, and then she
had known quite surely that she was pretty enough to be anyone's
sweetheart. When she was a child a well-meaning aunt had told her that
as she would never be pretty or clever she had better try to be good,
or no one would love her. She had tried, and she had never till that
red-rose day doubted that such goodness as she had achieved must be her
only claim to love. Now she knew better, and she looked out of her
window at the brightening sky and the deepening shadows. But there was
no one to throw her a rose with kisses on it.
"If I were a man," she said to herself, but in a very secret shadowy
corner of her inmost heart, and in a wordless whisper, "if I were a man,
I would go out this minute and find a sweetheart. She should have dark
eyes, too, and rough brown hair, and pink cheeks."