a pace or two among the heather without replying. The
pause was filled up by the intonation of a pollard thorn a little way
to windward, the breezes filtering through its unyielding twigs as
through a strainer. It was as if the night sang dirges with clenched
teeth.

She continued, half sorrowfully, "Since meeting you last, it has
occurred to me once or twice that perhaps it was not for love of me
you did not marry her. Tell me, Damon: I'll try to bear it. Had I
nothing whatever to do with the matter?"

"Do you press me to tell?"

"Yes, I must know. I see I have been too ready to believe in my own
power."

"Well, the immediate reason was that the license would not do for the
place, and before I could get another she ran away. Up to that point
you had nothing to do with it. Since then her aunt has spoken to me
in a tone which I don't at all like."

"Yes, yes! I am nothing in it--I am nothing in it. You only trifle
with me. Heaven, what can I, Eustacia Vye, be made of to think so
much of you!"

"Nonsense; do not be so passionate... Eustacia, how we roved among
these bushes last year, when the hot days had got cool, and the shades
of the hills kept us almost invisible in the hollows!"

She remained in moody silence till she said, "Yes; and how I used to
laugh at you for daring to look up to me! But you have well made me
suffer for that since."

"Yes, you served me cruelly enough until I thought I had found some
one fairer than you. A blessed find for me, Eustacia."

"Do you still think you found somebody fairer?"

"Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. The scales are balanced so nicely
that a feather would turn them."

"But don't you really care whether I meet you or whether I don't?" she
said slowly.

"I care a little, but not enough to break my rest," replied the young
man languidly. "No, all that's past. I find there are two flowers
where I thought there was only one. Perhaps there are three, or four,
or any number as good as the first... Mine is a curious fate. Who
would have thought that all this could happen to me?"

She interrupted with a suppressed fire of which either love or anger
seemed an equally possible issue, "Do you love me now?"

"Who can say?"

"Tell me; I will know it!"

"I do, and I do not," said he mischievously. "That is, I have my
times and my seasons. One moment you are too tall, another moment you
are too do-nothing, another too melancholy, another too dark, another
I don't know