'Avice--my dear Avice! Why--what are you doing? Don't you know that you've grown up to be a woman since Jocelyn--Mr. Pierston--was last down here? Of course you mustn't do now as you used to do three or four years ago!'
The awkwardness which had arisen was hardly removed by Pierston's assurance that he quite expected her to keep up the practice of her childhood, followed by several minutes of conversation on general subjects. He was vexed from his soul that his unaware movement should so have betrayed him. At his leaving he repeated that if Avice regarded him otherwise than as she used to do he would never forgive her; but though they parted good friends her regret at the incident was visible in her face. Jocelyn passed out into the road and onward to his father's house hard by. The mother and daughter were left alone.
'I was quite amazed at 'ee, my child!' exclaimed the elder. 'A young man from London and foreign cities, used now to the strictest company manners, and ladies who almost think it vulgar to smile broad! How could ye do it, Avice?'
'I--I didn't think about how I was altered!' said the conscience- stricken girl. 'I used to kiss him, and he used to kiss me before he went away.'
'But that was years ago, my dear!'
'O yes, and for the moment I forgot! He seemed just the same to me as he used to be.'
'Well, it can't be helped now. You must be careful in the future.
He's got lots of young women, I'll warrant, and has few thoughts left for you. He's what they call a sculptor, and he means to be a great genius in that line some day, they do say.'
'Well, I've done it; and it can't be mended!' moaned the girl.
Meanwhile Jocelyn Pierston, the sculptor of budding fame, had gone onward to the house of his father, an inartistic man of trade and commerce merely, from whom, nevertheless, Jocelyn condescended to accept a yearly allowance pending the famous days to come. But the elder, having received no warning of his son's intended visit, was not at home to receive him. Jocelyn looked round the familiar premises, glanced across the Common at the great yards within which eternal saws were going to and fro upon eternal blocks of stone--the very same saws and the very same blocks that he had seen there when last in the island, so it seemed to him--and then passed through the dwelling into the back garden.
Like all the gardens in the isle it was surrounded by a wall of dry- jointed spawls, and at its further extremity it ran out into a corner, which adjoined the garden of the Caros. He had no sooner reached this spot than he became aware of a murmuring and sobbing on the other side of the wall. The voice he recognized in a moment as Avice's, and she seemed to be confiding her trouble to some young friend of her own sex.
'Oh, what shall I DO! what SHALL I do!' she was saying bitterly. 'So bold as it was--so shameless! How could I think of such a thing! He will never forgive me--never, never like me again! He'll think me a forward hussy, and yet--and yet I quite forgot how much I had grown.
But that he'll never believe!' The accents were those of one who had for the first time become conscious of her womanhood, as an unwonted possession which shamed and frightened her.
'Did he seem angry at it?' inquired the friend.
'O no--not angry! Worse. Cold and haughty. O, he's such a fashionable person now--not at all an island man. But there's no use in talking of it. I wish I was dead!'
Pierston retreated as quickly as he could. He grieved at the incident which had brought such pain to this innocent soul; and yet it was beginning to be a source of vague pleasure to him. He returned to the house, and when his father had come back and welcomed him, and they had shared a meal together, Jocelyn again went out, full of an earnest desire to soothe his young neighbour's sorrow in a way she little expected; though, to tell the truth, his affection for her was rather that of a friend than of a lover, and he felt by no means sure that the migratory, elusive idealization he called his Love who, ever since his boyhood, had flitted from human shell to human shell an indefinite number of times, was going to take up her abode in the body of Avice Caro.
