low, 'Let us go back to the
house; I am alone.'

So we went back, and after the door was bolted, took both hands and stood
up face to face in the passage looking into one another's eyes. I was
tired with a long walk and sleepless night, and so full of joy to see her
again that my head swam and all seemed a sweet dream. Then she squeezed
my hands, and I knew 'twas real, and was for kissing her for very love;
but she guessed what I would be at, perhaps, and cast my hands loose,
drawing back a little, as if to see me better, and saying, 'John, you
have grown a man in these two months.' So I did not kiss her.

But if it was true that I was grown a man, it was truer still that she
was grown a woman, and as tall as I. And these recent sufferings had
taken from her something of light and frolic girlhood, and left her with
a manner more staid and sober. She was dressed in black, with longer
skirts, and her hair caught up behind; and perhaps it was the mourning
frock that made her look pale and thin, as Ratsey said. So while I looked
at her, she looked at me, and could not choose but smile to see my
carter's smock; and as for my brown face and hands, thought I had been
hiding in some country underneath the sun, until I told her of the
walnut-juice. Then before we fell to talking, she said it was better we
should sit in the garden, for that a woman might come in to help her with
the house, and anyway it was safer, so that I might get out at the back
in case of need. So she led the way down the corridor and through the
living-part of the house, and we passed several rooms, and one little
parlour lined with shelves and musty books. The blinds were pulled, but
let enough light in to show a high-backed horsehair chair that stood at
the table. In front of it lay an open volume, and a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles, that I had often seen on Maskew's nose; so I knew it was his
study, and that nothing had been moved since last he sat there. Even now
I trembled to think in whose house I was, and half-expected the old
attorney to step in and hale me off to jail; till I remembered how all my
trouble had come about, and how I last had seen him with his face turned
up against the morning sun.

Thus we came to the garden, where I had never been before. It was a great
square, shut in with a brick wall of twelve or fifteen feet, big enough
to suit a palace, but then ill kept and sorely overgrown. I could spend
long in speaking of that plot; ho