eded she gave them an
admirable tea of astonishing cheapness. Lewisham did not like the
second condition very much, because it seemed to touch a little on his
latest enterprise. But the tea and the bread and butter and the whort
jam were like no food on earth. There were wallflowers, heavy scented,
in a jug upon the table, and Ethel admired them, and when they set out
again the little old lady insisted on her taking a bunch with her.

It was after they left Immering that this ramble, properly speaking,
became scandalous. The sun was already a golden ball above the blue
hills in the west--it turned our two young people into little figures
of flame--and yet, instead of going homeward, they took the Wentworth
road that plunges into the Forshaw woods. Behind them the moon, almost
full, hung in the blue sky above the tree-tops, ghostly and
indistinct, and slowly gathered to itself such light as the setting
sun left for it in the sky.

Going out of Immering they began to talk of the future. And for the
very young lover there is no future but the immediate future.

"You must write to me," he said, and she told him she wrote such
_silly_ letters. "But I shall have reams to write to you," he told
her.

"How are you to write to me?" she asked, and they discussed a new
obstacle between them. It would never do to write home--never. She was
sure of that with an absolute assurance. "My mother--" she said and
stopped.

That prohibition cut him, for at that time he had the makings of a
voluminous letter-writer. Yet it was only what one might expect. The
whole world was unpropitious--obdurate indeed.... A splendid isolation
_a deux_.

Perhaps she might find some place where letters might be sent to her?
Yet that seemed to her deceitful.

So these two young people wandered on, full of their discovery of
love, and yet so full too of the shyness of adolescence that the word
"Love" never passed their lips that day. Yet as they talked on, and
the kindly dusk gathered about them, their speech and their hearts
came very close together. But their speech would seem so threadbare,
written down in cold blood, that I must not put it here. To them it
was not threadbare.

When at last they came down the long road into Whortley, the silent
trees were black as ink and the moonlight made her face pallid and
wonderful, and her eyes shone like stars. She still carried the
blackthorn from which most of the blossoms had fallen. The fragrant
wall