ght of
initiative had undergone a change. He was in all matters of love so
infinitely more experienced than she was that she could no longer
imagine herself taking the lead. Hitherto she had considered herself as
experienced and capable in love as in other things--had she not been
engaged for five months? Had she not received at least half a dozen
offers of marriage? But Albert had "learned her different." His sure,
almost careless, touch abashed her, and the occasional fragments of
autobiography which he let fall, showed her that she was a limited and
ignorant recluse compared to this boy of twenty-five. In matters of
money and achievement she might brag, but in matters of love she was
strangely subservient to him, because in such matters he had everything
to teach her.

They stopped for tea at Ivychurch; the little inn and the big church
beside the New Sewer were hazed over in a cloud of floating sunshine and
dust. She had been here before with Martin, and after tea she and Albert
went into the church and looked around them. But his interest in old
places was not the same as Martin's. He called things "quaint" and
"rummy," and quoted anything he had read about them in the guide-book,
but he could not make them come alive in a strange re-born youth--he
could not make her feel the beauty of the great sea on which the French
ships had ridden, or the splendours of the Marsh before the Flood, with
all its towns and taverns and steeples. Unconsciously she missed this
appeal to her sleeping imagination, and her bringing of him into the
great church, which could have held an the village in its aisles, was an
effort to supply what was lacking.

But Albert's attitude towards the church was critical and
unsatisfactory. It was much too big for the village. It was ridiculous
... that little clump of chairs in all the huge emptiness ... what a
waste of money, paying a parson to idle away his time among a dozen
people.... "How Dreadful is this Place" ran the painted legend over the
arches.... Joanna trembled.

They came out on the farther side of the churchyard, where a little path
leads away into the hawthorns of the New Sewer. A faint sunshine was
spotting it through the branches, and suddenly Joanna's heart grew warm
and heavy with love. She wanted some sheltered corner where she could
hold his hand, feel his rough coat-sleeve against her cheek--or, dearer
still, carry his head on her bosom, that heavenly weight of a man's
he