she was trembling from head to
foot. 'There are many for whom it is easy and right to choose their own
way; their happiness robs no one. There are others on whom a charge has
been laid from their childhood a charge perhaps--and her voice faltered
at last--'impressed on them by dying lips, which must govern, possess
their lives; which it would be baseness, treason, to betray. We are not
here only to be happy.'

And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest smile on her
lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. He began phrase after
phrase, and broke them off. A whirlwind of feeling possessed him.
The strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had done struck him
singularly. He realized through every nerve that what she had just said
to him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last
parting. And now he could not tell, or, rather, blindly could not see,
whether she suffered in the saying it. A passionate protest rose in him,
not so much against her words as against her self-control. The man in
him rose up against the woman's unlooked-for, unwelcome strength.

But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplicity to avert
from them both were bursting from him, they were checked by a sudden
physical difficulty. A bit of road was under water. A little beck,
swollen by the rain, had overflowed, and for a few yards distance the
water stood about eight inches deep from hedge to hedge. Robert had
splashed through the flood half an hour before, but it had risen rapidly
since then. He had to apply his mind to the practical task of finding a
way to the other side.

'You must climb the bank,' he said, 'and get through into the field.'

She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, forced his way
through the loosely growing hedge himself, and holding back some young
hazel saplings and breaking others, made an opening for her through
which she scrambled with bent head; then, stretching out his hand to
her, he made her submit to be helped down the steep bank on the other
side. Her straight young figure was just above him, her breath almost on
his cheek.

'You talk of baseness and treason,' he began, passionately, conscious of
a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leant her light weight upon his
arm.

'Life is not so simple. It is so easy to sacrifice others with one's
self, to slay all claims in honor of one, instead of knitting the new
ones to the old. Is life to be a