prise at finding
in her ideals, revolts, passions, quite unknown to him, so far, in the
women of his own class. Naturally he suppressed, perhaps he had even
forgotten, the critical amusement and irritation she had often excited
in him. He remembered, he spoke only of sympathy, delight, pleasure--of
his sense, as it were, of slaking some long-felt moral thirst at the
well of her fresh feeling. So she had attracted him first,--by a certain
strangeness and daring--by what she _said_--

"Now--and above all by what you _are_!" he broke out suddenly, moved out
of his even speech. "Oh! it is too much to believe--to dream of! Put
your hand in mine, and say again that it is really _true_ that we two
are to go forward together--that you will be always there to inspire--to
help--"

And as she gave him the hand, she must also let him--in this first
tremor of a pure passion--take the kiss which was now his by right. That
she should flush and draw away from him as she did, seemed to him the
most natural thing in the world, and the most maidenly.

Then, as their talk wandered on, bit by bit, he gave her all his
confidence, and she had felt herself honoured in receiving it. She
understood now at least something--a first fraction--of that inner life,
masked so well beneath his quiet English capacity and unassuming manner.
He had spoken of his Cambridge years, of his friend, of the desire of
his heart to make his landowner's power and position contribute
something towards that new and better social order, which he too, like
Hallin--though more faintly and intermittently--believed to be
approaching. The difficulties of any really new departure were
tremendous; he saw them more plainly and more anxiously than Hallin. Yet
he believed that he had thought his way to some effective reform on his
grandfather's large estate, and to some useful work as one of a group of
like-minded men in Parliament. She must have often thought him careless
and apathetic towards his great trust. But he was not so--not
careless--but paralysed often by intellectual difficulty, by the claims
of conflicting truths.

She, too, explained herself most freely, most frankly. She would have
nothing on her conscience.

"They will say, of course," she said with sudden nervous abruptness,
"that I am marrying you for wealth and position. And in a sense I shall
be. No! don't stop me! I should not marry you if--if--I did not like
you. But you can give me--you have--great o