Читать книгу The Passionate Quest онлайн

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"The flower itself was exquisite," he remonstrated.

The girl, in her eager bitterness, ceased for a moment to be beautiful.

"I am unjust," she admitted, "but that is because the smuts are settling upon me. A year or two more of this place and I shall be like those wild roses—and I hate the thought!"

They reached their destination, more breathless than ever now, but, so far as the first two were concerned, with an eagerness which seemed incomprehensible. They entered the wood through a gate and passed along a path strewn and sodden with pine needles, soft to the feet and fragrant. All around them, between the bare, straight fronts of the thickly planted trees, they caught little glimpses of the promised land beyond—a real expanse of meadows, cornfields and wooded glades. On the far horizon, it is true, stretched the scars of a smoke-hung town, and, on their left, factory chimneys here and there marred the landscape. But when they skirted the outside of the plantation and reached its westward corner, there was nothing within the range of their vision but the cornfield sloping down towards the valley, a stretch of meadowland, a steep rise, and, beyond, a rolling waste of moorland, starred with yellow gorse, faintly pink in sheltered places with the promise of the early bell heather. For the first time, all disfiguring traces of untoward industrial efforts were absent.