y
kiss.

"Come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. It's still not six. And
there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the
wet. Oh! it's so good to be out of things again--clean out of
things--with you. Look! there is a stag watching us."

"You're glad to be with me?" I ask, jealous of the very sunrise.

"I am always glad," she says, "to be with you. Why don't we always get
up at dawn, Stevenage, every day of our lives?"

We go rustling through the grass to the prostrate timber she has chosen.
(I can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that
lifted her skirt.) I help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from
which her feet can swing....

Such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this
morning. But then comes our conversation, and that I find vague and
irregularly obliterated. But I think I must have urged her to say she
loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to
put my heart's wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three
years for me--until I could prove it was not madness for her to marry
me. "I have been thinking of it all night and every night since I have
been here," I said. "Somehow I will do something. In some way--I will
get hold of things. Believe me!--with all my strength."

I was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon
me.

"Stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear Boy; I have never wanted to kiss
you so much in all my life. Dear, come close to me."

She bent her fresh young face down to mine, her fingers were in my hair.

"My Knight," she whispered close to me. "My beautiful young Knight."

I whispered back and touched her dew fresh lips....

"And tell me what you would do to conquer the world for me?" she asked.

I cannot remember now a word of all the vague threatenings against the
sundering universe with which I replied. Her hand was on my shoulder as
she listened....

But I do know that even on this first morning she left me with a sense
of beautiful unreality, of having dipped for some precious moments into
heroic gossamer. All my world subjugation seemed already as evanescent
as the morning haze and the vanishing dews as I stood, a little hidden
in the shadows of the Killing Wood and ready to plunge back at the first
hint of an observer, and watched her slender whiteness flit
circumspectly towards the house.

Sec. 3

Our next three or four meetings are