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Within the park new grass was soft as plush under their feet, and once away from the winding asphalt of the main driveway the bosky heart of a dell closed them in, and the green was suddenly dappled with shadow. Here and there in the cool, damp spots violets lifted their heads and pale wood-anemones, spring's firstlings. They sat on a rock spread first with newspaper.
Whilst they were talking, the cart had come alongside a wood, which was exceedingly shady and beautiful. Many tufts of primroses, violets, and wood-anemones grew on the banks by the wayside; and as the wind blew gently over these flowers, it brought a most delightful smell. "What sound is that which I hear among the trees?" said Emily. "It is very sweet and soft."
But it could not, she decided for herself, be other than an innocent pastime, if they two sure to be separated by their different paths in life, to-morrow were to gather up some of the little pleasures that chanced to grow about their feet, like the violets and wood-anemones, to-day.
Beautiful wood-anemones I found, to be sure, trembling on their fragile stems, deserving all their pretty names, Wind-flower, Easter-flower, Pasque-flower, and homeopathic Pulsatilla; rue-leaved anemones I found also, rising taller and straighter and firmer in stem, with the whorl of leaves a little higher up on the stalk than one fancies it ought to be, as if there were a supposed danger that the flowers would lose their balance, and as if the leaves must be all ready to catch them.
One afternoon, last spring, I had been walking through a copse of young white birches, their leaves scarce yet apparent, over a ground delicate with wood-anemones, moist and mottled with dog's-tooth-violet leaves, and spangled with the delicate clusters of that shy creature, the Claytonia or Spring Beauty.
She set herself, therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the crevice of a high rock. When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow of the trees.
She set herself, therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the crevices of a high rock. When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow of the trees.
And that, indeed, was Sandro's fortune. He caught her in just such a propitious hour. He saw the sweet wild thing, pure and undefiled by touch of earth; caught her in that pregnant pause of time ere she had lighted. Another moment and a buxom nymph of the grove would fold her in a rosy mantle, coloured as the earliest wood-anemones are.
All around it were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where the young men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-day in the summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the wild campanula, and the fresh dog-rose, and all the boughs and grasses that made their house-doors like garden bowers, and seemed to take the cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.
At last becoming thoroughly tired she closed her book and raised her eyes wearily, when they fell on a jar of wild flowers which yesterday she had arranged and placed upon a bracket against the wall. It was spring, and in the jar was a cluster of pale wood-anemones with some sprays of bramble newly leafed.
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