XXIV
DISCOVERIES
It was a time of wonderful discoveries for Howard, that month spent
in the little house under the cliff and beside the cove. It was a
tiny hamlet with half a dozen fishermen's cottages and two or three
larger houses, holiday-dwellings for rich people; but there was no
one living there, except a family of children with a governess. The
house they were in belonged to an artist, and had a big studio in
which they mostly sate. An elderly woman and her niece were the
servants, and the life was the simplest that could be imagined.
Howard felt as if he would have liked it prolonged for ever. They
brought a few books with them, but did little else except ramble
through the long afternoons in the silent bays. It was warm, bright
September weather, still and hazy; and the sight of the dim golden-
brown promontories, with pale-green grass at the top, stretching
out one beyond another into the distance, became for Howard a
symbol of all that was most wonderful and perfect in life.
He could not cease to marvel at the fact that this beautiful young
creature, full of tenderness and anxious care for others, and with
love the one pre-occupation of her life, should yield herself thus
to him with such an entire and happy abandonment. Maud seemed for
the time to have no will of her own, no thought except to please
him; he could not get her to express a single preference, and her
guileless diplomacy to discover what he preferred amused and
delighted him.
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