re's a telephone. I loathe the telephone, the destroyer
of aloofness, the missionary that breaks into privacy." He switched on
the lights in several old lanterns as he spoke. The day had almost
disappeared.

He went over to her and stood smiling.

"Well, isn't this better than a road-house reeking of food and flies
and made hideous by a Jazz band?"

"Much better," she said.

The delightful silence was broken by the crickets.

"Martin--Martin," she thought, "and it was all my fault."

A sort of tremble ran over Gilbert as he looked at her. Agony and joy
clashed in his heart. He had suffered, gone sleepless, worn himself out
by hard, grim exercise in order, who knew how many times, to master his
almost unendurable passion. He had killed long nights, the very thought
of which made him shudder, by reading books of which he never took in a
word. He had stood up in the dark, unmanned, and cursed himself and her
and life. He had denounced her to himself and once to her as a flapper,
a fool-girl, an empty-minded frivolous thing encased in a body as
beautiful as spring. He had thrown himself on his knees and wept like a
young boy who had been hurt to the very quick by a great injustice. He
had faced himself up, and with the sort of fear that comes to men in
moments of physical danger, recognized madness in his eyes. But not
until that instant, as she stood before him unguarded in his lonely
cottage, so slight and sweet and unexpectedly gentle, her eyes as
limpid as the water of a brook, her lips soft and kind and unkissed,
her whole young body radiating virginity, did he really know how
amazingly and frighteningly he loved her. But once again he held back a
rush of adoring words and a desire to touch and hold and claim. The
time had not come yet. Let her warm to him. Let him live down the
ugliness of the mood that she had recently put him into, do away with
the impression he must have given her of jealousy and petulance and
scorn. Let her get used to him as a man who had it in him to be as
natural and impersonal, and even as cubbish, as some of the boys she
knew. Later, when night had laid its magic on the earth, he would make
his last bid for her kisses--or take her with him across the horizon.

"How do you like that?" he asked, and pointed to a charmingly grotesque
piece of old Staffordshire pottery which made St. George a stunted
churchwarden with the legs of a child, his horse the kind of animal
that would be used in