as she walked a little in
front of him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning he
saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with Katharine.
He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but powerful and
independent figure, for whose courage he felt the greatest respect.

"Don't go away, Mary!" he exclaimed, and stopped.

"That's what you said before, Ralph," she returned, without looking at
him. "You want to go away yourself and you don't want me to go away.
That's not very sensible, is it?"

"Mary," he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and
dictatorial ways with her, "what a brute I've been to you!"

It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to thrust
back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if he chose.
She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of respect for
herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade surrender, even
in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when all was tempest and
high-running waves, she knew of a land where the sun shone clear upon
Italian grammars and files of docketed papers. Nevertheless, from the
skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that broke its surface,
she knew that her life there would be harsh and lonely almost beyond
endurance. She walked steadily a little in front of him across the
plowed field. Their way took them round the verge of a wood of thin
trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land. Looking between
the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly flat and richly
green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small gray manor-house, with
ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it, a farm building or
so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising behind, all perfectly
sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house the hill rose again,
and the trees on the farther summit stood upright against the sky, which
appeared of a more intense blue between their trunks. His mind at once
was filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katharine; the gray
house and the intense blue sky gave him the feeling of her presence
close by. He leant against a tree, forming her name beneath his breath:

"Katharine, Katharine," he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw Mary
walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the trees
as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the vision he
held in his mind that he returned t