ssed very few opportunities of
implicitly deriding the Liberal views of Mr. Kirkham. The whole school
with its ant-like energy, whose ultimate object and obvious result were
alike inscrutable to Michael, just idly amused him, and he reserved for
Lily all his zest in life.

The Lent term passed away with parsimonious February sunlight, with
March lying grey upon the houses until it proclaimed itself suddenly in
a booming London gale. The Easter holidays arrived, and Mrs. Fane
determined to go to Germany and see Stella. Would Michael come? Michael
pleaded many disturbed plans of cricket-practice; of Matriculation at
St. Mary's College, Oxford; of working for the English Literature Prize;
of anything indeed but his desire to see with Lily April break to May.
In the end he had his own way, and Mrs. Fane went to the continent
without his escort.

Lily was never eager for the discussions and the contingencies and the
doubts of love; in all their walks it had been Michael who flashed the
questions, she who let slip her answers. The strange fatigue of spring
made much less difference to her than to him, and however insistent he
was for her kisses, she never denied him. Michael tried to feel that the
acquiescence of the hard, the reasonable, the intellectual side of him
to April's passionate indulgence merely showed that he was more surely
and more sanely growing deeper in love with Lily every day. Sometimes he
had slight tremors of malaise, a sensation of weakening fibres, and dim
stirrings of responsibility; but too strong for them was his
heart's-ease, too precious was Lily's rose-bloomed grace of submission.
The more sharply imminent her form became upon his thought, the more
surely deathless did he suppose his love. Michael's mind was always
framing moments in eternity, and of all these moments the sight of her
lying upon the vivid grass, the slim, the pastoral, the fair immortal
girl stood unparagoned by any. There was no landscape that Lily did not
make more inevitably composed. There was no place of which she did not
become tutelary, whether she lay among the primroses that starred the
steep brown banks of woodland or whether she fronted the great sunshine
of the open country; but most of all when she sat in cowslips, looking
over arched knees at the wind.

Michael fell into the way of talking to her as if he were playing upon
Dorian pipes the tale of his love:

"I must buy you a ring, Lily. What ring shall I buy for