f course if she did not refuse him . . . Ah! well,
then would the gates of Heaven open . . . But that would never be. The
past could not be blotted out! All he could do would be to serve her. He
would go early. Such a man as Leonard Everard might make some new
complication, and the present was quite bad enough.

It was a poor enough thing for him, he thought at length. She might
trample on him; but it was for her sake. And to him what did it matter?
The worst had come. All was over now!

CHAPTER XIV--THE BEECH GROVE

On the morning following the proposal Stephen strolled out into a beech
grove, some little distance from the house, which from childhood had been
a favourite haunt of hers. It was not in the immediate road to anywhere,
and so there was no occasion for any of the household or the garden to go
through it or near it. She did not put on a hat, but took only a
sunshade, which she used in passing over the lawn. The grove was on the
side of the house away from her own room and the breakfast-room. When
she had reached its shade she felt that at last she was alone.

The grove was a privileged place. Long ago a great number of young
beeches had been planted so thickly that as they grew they shot up
straight and branchless in their struggle for the light. Not till they
had reached a considerable altitude had they been thinned; and then the
thinning had been so effected that, as the high branches began to shoot
out in the freer space, they met in time and interlaced so closely that
they made in many places a perfect screen of leafy shade. Here and there
were rifts or openings through which the light passed; under such places
the grass was fine and green, or the wild hyacinths in due season tinged
the earth with blue. Through the grove some wide alleys had been left:
great broad walks where the soft grass grew short and fine, and to whose
edges came a drooping of branches and an upspringing of undergrowth of
laurel and rhododendron. At the far ends of these walks were little
pavilions of marble built in the classic style which ruled for garden use
two hundred years ago. At the near ends some of them were close to the
broad stretch of water from whose edges ran back the great sloping banks
of emerald sward dotted here and there with great forest trees. The
grove was protected by a ha-ha, so that it was never invaded from
without, and the servants of the house, both the domestics and the
garde