ho so
completely occupied her heart. She was at peace now with Sheila, whose
virility forbade that she should dispute pride of place with this soft
and truthful guest, so evidently immersed in rapture. Besides, Nedda had
that quality of getting on well with her own sex, found in those women
who, though tenacious, are not possessive; who, though humble, are
secretly very self-respecting; who, though they do not say much about
it, put all their eggs in one basket; above all, who disengage, no
matter what their age, a candid but subtle charm.

But that fortnight was even more wonderful for Derek, caught between two
passions--both so fervid. For though the passion of his revolt against
the Mallorings did not pull against his passion for Nedda, they both
tugged at him. And this had one curious psychological effect. It made
his love for Nedda more actual, less of an idealization. Now that she
was close to him, under the same roof, he felt the full allurement of
her innocent warmth; he would have been cold-blooded indeed if he had
not taken fire, and, his pride always checking the expression of his
feelings, they glowed ever hotter underneath.

Yet, over those sunshiny days there hung a shadow, as of something kept
back, not shared between them; a kind of waiting menace. Nedda learned
of Kirsteen and Sheila all the useful things she could; the evenings she
passed with Derek, those long evenings of late May and early June, this
year so warm and golden. They walked generally in the direction of the
hills. A favorite spot was a wood of larches whose green shoots had not
yet quite ceased to smell of lemons. Tall, slender things those trees,
whose stems and dried lower branch-growth were gray, almost sooty, up
to the feathery green of the tops, that swayed and creaked faintly in a
wind, with a soughing of their branches like the sound of the sea.
From the shelter of those Highland trees, rather strange in such
a countryside, they two could peer forth at the last sunlight
gold-powdering the fringed branches, at the sunset flush dyeing the
sky above the Beacon; watch light slowly folding gray wings above
the hay-fields and the elms; mark the squirrels scurry along, and the
pigeons' evening flight. A stream ran there at the edge, and beech-trees
grew beside it. In the tawny-dappled sand bed of that clear water,
and the gray-green dappled trunks of those beeches with their great,
sinuous, long-muscled roots, was that something which m