"Whatever is the matter?" she asked. "I did not expect you so soon. I thought that Mr. Bomford and father wanted to talk to you." "So they did," he replied. "They made me a foolish offer. It was Mr. Bomford's idea, I am sure, not your father's. I am tired, Edith. Come and walk with me."—She glanced out of the window.
"I think," she said demurely, "that I am expected to go for a ride with
Mr. Bomford."
"Then please disappoint him," he pleaded. "I do not like your friend Mr. Bomford. He is an egotistical and ignorant person. We will go across the moors, we will climb our little hill. Perhaps we might even wait there until the sunset."
"I am quite sure," she said decidedly, "that Mr. Bomford would not like that."
"What does it matter?" he answered. "A man like Mr. Bomford has no right to have any authority over you at all. You are of a different clay. I am sure that you will never marry him. If you will not walk with me, I shall work, and I am not in the humor for work. I shall probably spoil one of my best chapters."
She rose to her feet.
"In the interests of your novel!" she murmured. "Come! Only we had better go out by the back door."
Like children they stole out of the house. They climbed the rolling
moorland till they reached the hill on the further side of the valley.
She sat down, breathless, with her back against the trunk of a small
Scotch fir. Burton threw himself on to the ground by her side.
"We think too much always of consequences," he said "After this evening, what does anything matter? The gorse is a flaming yellow; do you see how it looks like a field of gold there in the distance? Only the haze separates it from the blue sky. Look down where I am pointing, Edith. It was there by the side of the road that I first looked into the garden and saw you."
"It was not you who looked," she objected, shaking her head. "It was the other man."