and two
or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but to recall her
mind in their present circumstances to a sense of these details was
impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious of everything. He
suspected that in her silence she was reproaching herself; but he wished
that she would think of her hair and of the dead beech-leaves, which
were of more immediate importance to him than anything else. Indeed,
these trifles drew his attention strangely from his own doubtful and
uneasy state of mind; for relief, mixing itself with pain, stirred up a
most curious hurry and tumult in his breast, almost concealing his
first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming disappointment. In order to
relieve this restlessness and close a distressingly ill-ordered scene,
he rose abruptly and helped Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little
at the minute care with which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed the
dead leaves from his own coat, she flinched, seeing in that action the
gesture of a lonely man.

"William," she said, "I will marry you. I will try to make you happy."

CHAPTER XIX

The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers,
Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts
of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to this
return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or so
of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following the
passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to the
five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined each
word with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities of
an ancient text. He was determined that the glow, the romance, the
atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he must in future
regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not because her
thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed empty of
thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph's presence, as she knew,
preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of loneliness when
many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present moment her effort
was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect, for
such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so involuntarily
revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not much matter,
perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that vision of herself
which keeps pace so evenly beside every