might have seen, had he been gifted in
psychology, that there was in Lord John's face the look of a man who had
fought a battle with his dark angel and been, alas, defeated.

III

After luncheon Roddy said:

"Miss Beaminster, come for a walk?"

"A little way," she said, looking at him with her eyes in that straight
direct way that she had.

"She must know," said Roddy to himself, "that I'm going to do it now.
They all know. It's awful!"

Some of the others had gathered together under a great oak that shaded
the central lawn, and now as he climbed the hill with his capture he
felt that from beneath that tree many eyes watched them.

They did not go very far. At the top of the hill, above the little wood
and the gardens and the house, there was a grassy hollow, and under this
grassy hollow a great field of wheat, a sheet of red-gold with sudden
waves and ripples in it as though some hand were shaking it, ran down to
the valley.

"Let's stop here," Rachel said. "I was out all this morning with Nita
Raseley and it's too hot for any exertion whatever."

A tree shaded them and they sat down and watched corn.

"What sort of a girl do you think she is--Nita Raseley, I mean?" asked
Rachel.

"Oh! I don't know--the ordinary kind of girl--why?"

"She seems to want to know me. Says that she hasn't many friends. Is
that true? I thought she had heaps----"

"You never can tell with girls. You're all so uncertain about one
another--devoted one moment and enemies the next."

"Are we?" said Rachel slowly. "I don't think I'm like that--Oh! how hot
it is!" She lay back against the grass with her arms behind her head.

"Do you like me?" Roddy said suddenly.

"I?... You!"

She slowly sat up and he saw at once that she knew now what he was going
to say. At that moment, sitting there, staring at him, with her breasts
moving a little beneath her white dress and her hands pressing flatly
against the grass, in her agitation and the look in her eyes of some
suddenly evoked personality that he did not know at all she was more
elusive to him than she had ever been--

She was frightened--and also glad--but the change in her from the girl
he had known all the summer was so startling that he felt that he was
about to propose to someone he had never seen before.

"Do I like you?" she repeated slowly, and her lips parted in a smile.

"Yes," he said, looking at her hands that seemed to belong to the earth
into which they were pr