nd each other, to this sudden
hostility! And the owl went on hooting, and the larches smelled sweet!
And all around was the same soft dusk wherein the flowers in her hair
and round her waist gleamed white! But for Nedda the world had suddenly
collapsed. Tears rushed into her eyes; she shook her head and turned
away, hiding them passionately.... A full minute passed, each straining
to make no sound and catch the faintest sound from the other, till
in her breathing there was a little clutch. His fingers came stealing
round, touched her cheeks, and were wetted. His arms suddenly squeezed
all breath out of her; his lips fastened on hers. She answered those
lips with her own desperately, bending her head back, shutting her wet
eyes. And the owl hooted, and the white flowers fell into the dusk off
her hair and waist.

After that, they walked once more enlaced, avoiding with what perfect
care any allusion to the sudden tragedy, giving themselves up to the
bewildering ecstasy that had started throbbing in their blood with that
kiss, longing only not to spoil it. And through the sheltering larch
wood their figures moved from edge to edge, like two little souls in
paradise, unwilling to come forth.

After that evening love had a poignancy it had not quite had before; at
once deeper, sweeter, tinged for both of them with the rich darkness of
passion, and with discovery that love does not mean a perfect merger
of one within another. For both felt themselves in the right over that
little quarrel. The boy that he could not, must not, resign what was
not his to resign; feeling dimly, without being quite able to shape the
thought even to himself, that a man has a life of action into which a
woman cannot always enter, with which she cannot always be identified.
The girl feeling that she did not want any life into which he did not
enter, so that it was hard that he should want to exclude her from
anything. For all that, she did not try again to move him to let her
into the secret of his plans of revolt and revenge, and disdained
completely to find them out from Sheila or her aunt.

And the grass went on ripening. Many and various as the breeds of men,
or the trees of a forest, were the stalks that made up that greenish
jungle with the waving, fawn-colored surface; of rye-grass and
brome-grass, of timothy, plantain, and yarrow; of bent-grass and
quake-grass, foxtail, and the green-hearted trefoil; of dandelion, dock,
musk-thistle, and