lorable. I will go and change it."

She turned to go, but she lingered instead, and said with an odd,
introductory laugh:

"I believe you saved my life!"

"Well, I am glad I was here. You might have lost self-possession--even
_you_ might, you know!--and then it would have been serious."

"Anyway"--her voice was still uncertain--"I might have been
disfigured--disfigured for life!"

"I don't know why you should dwell upon it now it's done with," he
declared, smiling.

"It would be strange, wouldn't it, if I took it quite for granted--all
in the day's work?" She held out her hand: "I am grateful--please."

He bowed over it, laughing, again with that eighteenth-century air which
might have become a Chevalier des Grieux.

"May I exact a reward?"

"Ask it."

"Will you take me down with you to your village? I know you are going. I
must walk on afterwards and catch a midday train to Widrington. I have
an appointment there at two o'clock. But perhaps you will introduce me
to one or two of your poor people first?"

Marcella assented, went upstairs, changed her dress, and put on her
walking things, more than half inclined all the time to press her mother
to go with them. She was a little unstrung and tremulous, pursued by a
feeling that she was somehow letting herself go, behaving disloyally and
indecorously towards whom?--towards Aldous? But how, or why? She did not
know. But there was a curious sense of lost bloom, lost dignity,
combined with an odd wish that Mr. Wharton were not going away for the
day. In the end, however, she left her mother undisturbed.

By the time they were half way to the village, Marcella's uncomfortable
feelings had all passed away. Without knowing it, she was becoming too
much absorbed in her companion to be self-critical, so long as they were
together. It seemed to her, however, before they had gone more than a
few hundred yards that he was taking advantage--presuming on what had
happened. He offended her taste, her pride, her dignity, in a hundred
ways, she discovered. At the same time it was _she_ who was always on
the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against
the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave
her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy's country. He put her
through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations,
the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what
she hoped to do for it