ulate perplexity.
"It's curious how, in those first days, too, something that I didn't
understand came between us."

"Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It's part of
what's called the bliss of being young."

"Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in looking back. But it
couldn't, even then, have been as true of you as of me; and now----"

"Now," he said, "the only thing that matters is that we're sitting here
together."

He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have seemed conclusive
evidence of her power over him. But she took no pride in such triumphs.
It seemed to her that she wanted his allegiance and his adoration not so
much for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightly
any past phase of their relation he took something from its present
beauty. The colour rose to her face.

"Between you and me everything matters."

"Of course!" She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile. "That's
why," he went on, "'everything,' for me, is here and now: on this bench,
between you and me."

She caught at the phrase. "That's what I meant: it's here and now; we
can't get away from it."

"Get away from it? Do you want to? AGAIN?"

Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fitfully and with
reluctance, struggled to free itself, but the warmth of his nearness
penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape. Then,
suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less than the whole of her
happiness.

"'Again'? But wasn't it YOU, the last time----?"

She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp. But in the
interrogative light of her pause her companion's features underwent no
change.

"The last time? Last spring? But it was you who--for the best of
reasons, as you've told me--turned me back from your very door last
spring!"

She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to "thresh out," for her
sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, Time had so
conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her.

"I wrote as soon as I could," she rejoined. "I explained the delay and
asked you to come. And you never even answered my letter."

"It was impossible to come then. I had to go back to my post."

"And impossible to write and tell me so?"

"Your letter was a long time coming. I had waited a week--ten days. I
had some excuse for thinking, when it came, that you were in no great
hurry for an answer."

"Yo