But the weeks passed and Alban remained silent, and the declaration she had desired at first as an amusement now became a vital necessity to her fasting vanity. Believing that their surroundings at Hampstead, the formality, the servants, the splendor of "Five Gables," forbade that little comedy of love for which she hungered, she went off, in her father's absence, to their cottage at Henley, and compelling Alban to follow her, she played Phyllis to his Corydon with an ardor which could not have been surpassed. Aping the schoolgirl, she would wear her hair upon her shoulders, carry her gown shortened, and bare her sleeves to the suns of June. The rose garden became the arbor of her delights. "You shall love me," she said to herself--and in the determination a passion wholly vain and not a little hazardous found its birth and prospered.
For hours together now, she would compel this unconscious slave to row her in the silent reaches or to hide with her in backwaters to which the mob rarely came. Deluding him by the promise that her father was returning shortly from Paris and would come to Henley immediately upon his arrival, she led Alban to forget the days of waiting, petted him as though he had been her lover through the years, invited him a hundred times a day to say, "I love you--you shall be my wife."
In his turn, he remained silent and amazed, tempted sorely by her beauty, not understanding and yet desiring to understand why he could not love her. True, indeed, that the image of another would intervene sometimes--a little figure in rags, wan and pitiful and alone; but the environment in which the vision of the past had moved, the slums, the alleys, the mean streets, these would hedge the picture about and then leave the dreamer averse and shuddering. Not there could liberty be found again. The world must show its fields to the wanderer when again he dared it alone.
Alban remembered one night above all others of this strange seclusion, and that was a night of a woman's humiliation. There had been great bustle all day, the coming of oarsmen and of coaches to Henley, and all the aquatic renaissance which prefaces the great regatta. Their own cottage, lying just above the bridge with a shady garden extending to the water's edge, was no longer the place apart that it had been. Strangers now anchored a little way from their boat-house and consumed monstrous packets of sandwiches and the contents of abundant bottles. There were house-boats being tugged up and down the river, little groups of rowing men upon the bridge all day, the music of banjos by night, and lanterns glowing in the darkness. Anna watched this pretty scene as one who would really take a young girl's part in it. She simulated an interest in the rowing about which she knew nothing at all--visited the house-boats of such of her friends as had come down for the regatta, and was, in Willy Forrest's words, as "skittish as a two-year-old that had slipped its halter." Forrest had been to and fro from the stable near Winchester on several occasions. "He comes to tell me that I am about to lose a fortune, and I am beginning to hate him," Anna said; and on this occasion she enjoyed that diverting and unaccustomed recreation known as speaking the truth.