m one. It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it
meant the sheer blissful instant.

At the foot of the hill, he said: 'It's harder to keep to, the terms of
yesterday.'

'What were they?' said she, and took his breath more than the fury of
the storm had done.

'Raise the veil, I beg.'

'Widows do not wear it.'

The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the
glittering shooter of arrows.

'Have you...?' changed to me, was the signification understood. 'Can
you?--for life'. Do you think you can?'

His poverty in the pleading language melted her.

'What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a
throne, with you petitioning. Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine,
if you hold it worthy of you. We will speak of that. Now tell me the
name of the weed trailing along the hedge there!

He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion
baffled him. It was clematis, he said.

'It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to. I passed
it beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a
likeness. How foolish I was! I could volubly sermonize; only it should
be a young maid to listen. Forgive me the yesterday.'

'You have never to ask. You withdraw your hand--was I rough?'

'No,' she smiled demurely; 'it must get used to the shackles: but my
cottage is in sight. I have a growing love for the place. We will enter
it like plain people--if you think of coming in.'

As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably
hawkish in their male glitter; but her coolness was not disturbed; and
without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the
silly division and war of the sexes:--which two might surely enter on an
engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl
and falcon interlude. Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having
good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden
and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she
was proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages,
while untying her bonnet-strings:--'If I had begun my life in a
cottage!'--when really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and
whirled her to mid-sea, out of every sensibility but the swimming one of
her loss of self in the man.

'You would not have been here!' was all he said. She was up at his
heart, fast-locked, undergoing a chang