t," she
jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I
want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they
travelled far into a new sphere of love.

It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from
her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express
train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her
that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.
But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder
out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and
pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear.
She swung round to see what it was.

A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.
Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that
the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what
was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with
her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that
these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet
interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut
unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass
buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the
woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored
skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were
ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."

The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting
clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the
shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they
should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured
the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect
harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in
disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.
She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into
their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection
and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover
what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.
There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united
several qualities that one would not have thought could be found
together. She was