ce tightened and slackened. The man then sat
upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back
upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face,
as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her
expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur
again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel
retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.

"I don't like that," said Rachel after a moment.

"I can remember not liking it either," said Hewet. "I can remember--"
but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice,
"Well, we may take it for granted that they're engaged. D'you think
he'll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?"

But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight
they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.

"Love's an odd thing, isn't it, making one's heart beat."

"It's so enormously important, you see," Hewet replied. "Their lives are
now changed for ever."

"And it makes one sorry for them too," Rachel continued, as though she
were tracing the course of her feelings. "I don't know either of them,
but I could almost burst into tears. That's silly, isn't it?"

"Just because they're in love," said Hewet. "Yes," he added after a
moment's consideration, "there's something horribly pathetic about it, I
agree."

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had
come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded
to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force,
though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of
the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been
repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different,
merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

"A great encampment of tents they might be," said Hewet, looking in
front of him at the mountains. "Isn't it like a water-colour too--you
know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper--I've been
wondering what they looked like."

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded
Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail. She sat beside him
looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any longer,
the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their
natural limit