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Barnaby nearly bit his own fingers, so engaged was he in looking at the lasses at the nearby table. He’d come to the end of the bun he was eating and only at the last moment as he teeth began to press lightly on his thumb and index finger did he realize it was so. He colored slightly, hoping neither of the two younger ladies had seen his mistake, and fussed about with his napkin, wiping the smears of honey and butter from his fingers.
Despite the near miss with the bun he had been eating, his looky-loo’ing had brought him some resolution to his thoughts on the two lasses. He could hear his Gran chiding him even now at the value of his judgment. ‘You got to look beneath the surface, Baranaby Stonecrop, before you bite into the apple,’ was one of her generally useful catch-phrases. ‘Might be rotten at the core, and you’d never know it less you examine it a bit closer.’
He couldn’t, for the life of him, see as how either of the two would be in the least rotten or even wormy a bit, if you took the image a little further. Now the gold haired one was fair enough, and she walked with a certain sort of solid confidence in her step. And those eyes – well they were blue as a fair Shire sky in summer. He knew a few friends of his who’d be swooning at her feet if she glanced even once their way.
But Barnaby’s eye was caught with the darker haired of the two. She seemed more quiet than her companion. And were he to wax poetic, her eyes held some banked fire within their dark glimmering.
He picked up another bun and layered it with butter and honey, all the better to let his thoughts meander down paths of possibility.
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