ered.

"It must be rough on the road--the wood moans so."

"You can see by the clouds it's a south-west wind; that helps me here."

"You see, I don't cycle, so I don't understand," she murmured.

"Is there need to cycle to know that!" he said.

She thought his sarcasms were unnecessary. They went forward in silence.
Round the wild, tussocky lawn at the back of the house was a thorn
hedge, under which daffodils were craning forward from among their
sheaves of grey-green blades. The cheeks of the flowers were greenish
with cold. But still some had burst, and their gold ruffled and glowed.
Miriam went on her knees before one cluster, took a wild-looking
daffodil between her hands, turned up its face of gold to her, and bowed
down, caressing it with her mouth and cheeks and brow. He stood aside,
with his hands in his pockets, watching her. One after another she
turned up to him the faces of the yellow, bursten flowers appealingly,
fondling them lavishly all the while.

"Aren't they magnificent?" she murmured.

"Magnificent! It's a bit thick--they're pretty!"

She bowed again to her flowers at his censure of her praise. He watched
her crouching, sipping the flowers with fervid kisses.

"Why must you always be fondling things?" he said irritably.

"But I love to touch them," she replied, hurt.

"Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to
pull the heart out of them? Why don't you have a bit more restraint, or
reserve, or something?"

She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly to stroke her
lips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she smelled it, was so
much kinder than he; it almost made her cry.

"You wheedle the soul out of things," he said. "I would never
wheedle--at any rate, I'd go straight."

He scarcely knew what he was saying. These things came from him
mechanically. She looked at him. His body seemed one weapon, firm and
hard against her.

"You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you were a
beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--"

Rhythmically, Miriam was swaying and stroking the flower with her mouth,
inhaling the scent which ever after made her shudder as it came to her
nostrils.

"You don't want to love--your eternal and abnormal craving is to be
loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as
if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage
somewhere."

She was stu