. Then she rose a little
abruptly to her feet.

"You can walk as far as the hayfield with me," she said.

They passed down the narrow garden path in single file. There had been
a storm in the night and the beds of pink and white stocks lay dashed
and drooping with a weight of glistening rain-drops. The path was
strewn with rose petals and the air seemed fuller than ever of a fresh
and delicate fragrance. At the end of the garden, a little gate led
into the orchard. Side by side they passed beneath the trees.

"Tell me," he begged in a low tone, "about this lover of yours!"

"There is so little to tell," she answered. "He is a member of the firm
who publish books for my father. He is quite kind to us both. He used
to come down here more often, even, than he does now, and one night he
asked my father whether he might speak to me."

"And your father?"

"My father was very much pleased," she continued. "We have little money
and father is not very strong. He told me that it had taken a weight
off his mind."

"How often does he come?" Burton asked.

"He was here last Sunday week."

"Last Sunday week! And you call him your lover!"

"No, I have not called him that," she reminded him gently. "He is not
that sort of man. Only I think that he is the person whom I shall
marry--some day."

"I am sure that you were beginning to like me," he insisted.

She turned and looked at him--at his pale, eager face with the hollow
eyes, the tremulous mouth--a curiously negative and wholly indescribable
figure, yet in some dim sense impressive through certain unspelt
suggestions of latent force. No one could have described him, in those
days, though no one with perceptions could have failed to observe much
that was unusual in his personality.

"It is true," she admitted. "I do like you. You seem to carry some
quality with you which I do not understand. What is it, I wonder? It
is something which reminds me of your writing."

"I think that it is truthfulness," he told her. "That is no virtue on
my part. It is sheer necessity. I am quite sure that if I had not been
obliged I should never have told you that it was I who stared at you
from the Common there, one of a hideous little band of trippers. I
should not even have told you about my wife. It is all so humiliating."

"It was yourself which obliged yourself," she pointed out,--"I mean
that the truthfulness was part of yourself. Do you know, it has set me
thinking so often. If