He meant to wait till the last hour of his visit. Only when
separation was imminent would he plead his cause again. Thus at the worst
he would have lost no happy hours of her company. And, in the mean time,
since she was always kind, and seemed to grow daily more familiar and at
ease in his society, he dared hope that affection for him and forgetfulness
of that other were growing side by side in her mind.
In this companionship Angela learnt many of the secrets and subtleties of
the angler's craft, as acquired by her teacher's personal experience, or
expounded in that delightful book, then less than twenty years old, which
has ever been the angler's gospel. Often after following the meandering
water till a gentle weariness invited them to rest, Angela and Denzil
seated themselves on a sheltered bank and read their Izaak Walton together,
both out of the same volume, he pleased to point out his favourite passages
and to watch her smile as she read.
Before May was ended, she knew old Izaak almost as well as Denzil, and had
learnt to throw a fly, and to choose the likeliest spot and the happiest
hour of the day for a good trout; had learnt to watch the clouds and
cloud-shadows with an angler's keen interest; and had amused herself with
the manufacture of an artificial minnow, upon Walton's recipe, devoting
careful labour and all the resources of her embroidery basket--silks and
silver thread--to perfecting the delicate model, which, when completed, she
presented smilingly to Denzil, who was strangely moved by so childish a
toy, and had some difficulty in suppressing his emotion as he held the
glistening silken fish in his hands, and thought how her tapering fingers
had caressed it, and how much of her very self seemed, as he watched her,
to have been enwrought with the fabric.
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