ting on well with her own sex, found in those women
who, though tenacious, are not possessive; who, though humble, are
secretly very self-respecting; who, though they do not say much about it,
put all their eggs in one basket; above all, who disengage, no matter
what their age, a candid but subtle charm.

But that fortnight was even more wonderful for Derek, caught between two
passions--both so fervid. For though the passion of his revolt against
the Mallorings did not pull against his passion for Nedda, they both
tugged at him. And this had one curious psychological effect. It made
his love for Nedda more actual, less of an idealization. Now that she
was close to him, under the same roof, he felt the full allurement of her
innocent warmth; he would have been cold-blooded indeed if he had not
taken fire, and, his pride always checking the expression of his
feelings, they glowed ever hotter underneath.

Yet, over those sunshiny days there hung a shadow, as of something kept
back, not shared between them; a kind of waiting menace. Nedda learned of
Kirsteen and Sheila all the useful things she could; the evenings she
passed with Derek, those long evenings of late May and early June, this
year so warm and golden. They walked generally in the direction of the
hills. A favorite spot was a wood of larches whose green shoots had not
yet quite ceased to smell of lemons. Tall, slender things those trees,
whose stems and dried lower branch-growth were gray, almost sooty, up to
the feathery green of the tops, that swayed and creaked faintly in a
wind, with a soughing of their branches like the sound of the sea. From
the shelter of those Highland trees, rather strange in such a
countryside, they two could peer forth at the last sunlight
gold-powdering the fringed branches, at the sunset flush dyeing the sky
above the Beacon; watch light slowly folding gray wings above the
hay-fields and the elms; mark the squirrels scurry along, and the
pigeons' evening flight. A stream ran there at the edge, and beech-trees
grew beside it. In the tawny-dappled sand bed of that clear water, and
the gray-green dappled trunks of those beeches with their great, sinuous,
long-muscled roots, was that something which man can never tame or garden
out of the land: the strength of unconquerable fertility--the remote deep
life in Nature's heart. Men and women had their spans of existence; those
trees seemed as if there forever! From generation to ge