the big oak with him, and then I shall
turn back, and I shall come in by the stile opposite the church gate,
and through the garden. So you can't miss me."

"I daresay he'll come back with you," said Grace.

"No, he won't. He will do nothing of the kind. He'll have to go on
and open Lady Julia's bottle of port wine for his own drinking."

All this was very good on Lily's part, and very good also on the
part of Mrs. Dale; and John was of course very much obliged to them.
But there was a lack of romance in it all, which did not seem to
him to argue well as to his success. He did not think much about it,
but he felt that Lily would not have been so ready to arrange their
walk had she intended to yield to his entreaty. No doubt in these
latter days plain good sense had become the prevailing mark of
her character,--perhaps, as Johnny thought, a little too strongly
prevailing; but even with all her plain good sense and determination
to dispense with the absurdities of romance in the affairs of her
life, she would not have proposed herself as his companion for a
walk across the fields merely that she might have an opportunity
of accepting his hand. He did not say all this to himself, but he
instinctively felt that it was so. And he felt also that it should
have been his duty to arrange the walk, or the proper opportunity for
the scene that was to come. She had done it instead,--she and her
mother between them, thereby forcing upon him a painful conviction
that he himself had not been equal to the occasion. "I always make a
mull of it," he said to himself, when the girls went up to get their
hats.

They went down together through the garden, and parted where the
paths led away, one to the great house and the other towards the
church. "I'll certainly come and call upon the squire before I go
back to London," said Johnny.

"We'll tell him so," said Mrs. Dale. "He would be sure to hear that
you had been with us, even if we said nothing about it."

"Of course he would," said Lily; "Hopkins has seen him." Then they
separated, and Lily and John Eames were together.

Hardly a word was said, perhaps not a word, till they had crossed the
road and got into the field opposite to the church. And in this first
field there was more than one path, and the children of the village
were often there, and it had about it something of a public nature.
John Eames felt that it was by no means a fitting field to say that
which he had to say.