ng
his shy formality as the convention it was, a kind of make-believe which
she would politely and kindly play up to until he should happily forget
it and they could enter upon simpler relations. She had to play up to it
for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient;
and of course the day came when she had her reward. Knowing him as she
did, she remembered the day and the difference it made.

It was toward the end of an afternoon in early April; the discoloured
snow still lay huddled in the bleaker fence corners. Wide puddles stood
along the roadsides, reflecting the twigs and branches of the naked
maples; last year's leaves were thick and wet underfoot, and a soft damp
wind was blowing. Advena was on her way home and Finlay overtook her.
He passed her at first, with a hurried silent lifting of his hat; then
perhaps the deserted street gave a suggestion of unfriendliness to his
act, or some freshness in her voice stayed him. At all events, he
waited and joined her, with a word or two about their going in the
same direction; and they walked along together. He offered her his
companionship, but he had nothing to say; the silence in which they
pursued their way was no doubt to him just the embarrassing condition he
usually had to contend with. To her it seemed pregnant, auspicious; it
drew something from the low grey lights of the wet spring afternoon and
the unbound heart-lifting wind; she had a passionate prevision that the
steps they took together would lead somehow to freedom. They went on in
that strange bound way, and the day drew away from them till they turned
a sudden corner, when it lay all along the yellow sky across the river,
behind a fringe of winter woods, stayed in the moment of its retreat on
the edge of unvexed landscape. They stopped involuntarily to look, and
she saw a smile come up from some depth in him.

"Ah, well," he said, as if to himself, "it's something to be in a
country where the sun still goes down with a thought of the primaeval."

"I think I prefer the sophistication of chimney-pots," she replied.
"I've always longed to see a sunset in London, with the fog breaking
over Westminster."

"Then you don't care about them for themselves, sunsets?" he asked, with
the simplest absence of mind.

"I never yet could see the sun go down, But I was angry in my heart,"
she said, and this time he looked at her.

"How does it go on?" he said.

"Oh, I don't know. Only those t