'Now you can push it through yourself. I hope it won't hurt much.'
Taking the hook, I push it through, and a drop of blood follows it.
'Oh!' she cries, but I assure her it is nothing, and stick the hook
surreptitiously in my coat sleeve. Then we both laugh, and I look at her
for the first time. She has a very white forehead, with little tendrils
of hair blowing round it under her grey cap, her eyes are grey. I didn't
see that then, I only saw they were steady, smiling eyes that matched
her mouth. Such a mouth, the most maddening mouth a man ever longed to
kiss, above a too-pointed chin, soft as a child's; indeed, the whole
face looks soft in the misty light.
'I am sorry I spoilt your sport!' I say.
'Oh, that don't matter, it's time to stop. I got two brace, one a
beauty.'
She is winding in her line, and I look in her basket; they _are_
beauties, one two-pounder, the rest running from a half to a pound.
'What fly?'
'Yellow dun took that one, but your assailant was a partridge spider.' I
sling her basket over my shoulder; she takes it as a matter of course,
and we retrace our steps.
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