ft her in his anger.

The actual outburst moved her only to laughter, but the memory of it
was violent in her nerves, it shook and shattered her. She had not
slept all night and in the morning she woke tired and ill. And, as
if he had known what he had done to her, he came to see her the next
evening, to make up.

That night they stayed out later than they had meant.

As they touched the moor the lambs stirred at their mothers' sides and
the pewits rose and followed the white road to lure them from their
secret places; they wheeled and wheeled round them, sending out their
bored and weary cry. In June the young broods kept the moor and the
two were forced to the white road.

And at the turn they came in sight of Greffington Edge.

She stood still. "Oh--Steven--look," she said.

He stood with her and looked.

The moon was hidden in the haze where the gray day and the white night
were mixed. Across the bottom on the dim, watery green of the eastern
slope, the thorn trees were in flower. The hot air held them like
still water. It quivered invisibly, loosening their scent and
scattering it. And of a sudden she saw them as if thrown back to a
distance where they stood enchanted in a great stillness and clearness
and a piercing beauty.

There went through her a sudden deep excitement, a subtle and
mysterious joy. This passion was as distant and as pure as ecstasy.
It swept her, while the white glamour lasted, into the stillness where
the flowering thorn trees stood.

* * * * *

She wondered whether Steven had seen the vision of the flowering thorn
trees. She longed for him to see it. They stood a little apart and her
hand moved toward him without touching him, as if she would draw him
to the magic.

"Steven--" she said.

He came to her. Her hand hung limply by her side again. She felt his
hand close on it and press it.

She knew that he had seen the vision and felt the subtle and
mysterious joy.

She wanted nothing more.

"Say good-night now," she said.

"Not yet. I'm going to walk back with you."

They walked back in a silence that guarded the memory of the mystic
thing.

They lingered a moment by the half-open door; she on the threshold, he
on the garden path; the width of a flagstone separated them.

"In another minute," she thought, "he will be gone."

It seemed to her that he wanted to be gone and that it was she who
held him there against his will and her own.