e said.

She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with an
expression between suspicion and impatience.

For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he'd
better get her water.

As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely
know how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swift
emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. I
see no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in that
moment, but it did. I do not believe that before then I had thought
of our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, the
factor of passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, and
neither of us said a word. But it was just as though something had been
shouted from the sky.

Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face. "I
shan't want any water," she said. "Call him back."

VI

After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had gone.
She came to me less frequently, and when she came she would have some
one with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk of the
talking. All through September she was away. When we were alone together
there was a curious constraint. We became clouds of inexpressible
feeling towards one another; we could think of nothing that was not too
momentous for words.

Then came the smash of Lord Roberts A, and I found myself with a
bandaged face in a bedroom in the Bedley Corner dower-house with
Beatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey very pink and
shocked in the background, and my aunt jealously intervening.

My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have been
taken to Lady Grove next day, but Beatrice would not permit that, and
kept me at Bedley Corner three clear days. In the afternoon of the
second day she became extremely solicitous for the proper aeration of
the nurse, packed her off for an hour in a brisk rain, and sat by me
alone.

I asked her to marry me.

All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent itself to
eloquence. I lay on my back and talked through bandages, and with
some little difficulty, for my tongue and mouth had swollen. But I was
feverish and in pain, and the emotional suspense I had been in so long
with regard to her became now an unendurable impatience.

"Comfortable?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Shall I read to you?"

"No. I want to talk."

"You