They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was shaken. But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering enemy made them one. It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it meant the sheer blissful instant.
At the foot of the hill, he said: 'It's harder to keep to, the terms of yesterday.'
'What were they?' said she, and took his breath more than the fury of the storm had done.
'Raise the veil, I beg.'
'Widows do not wear it.'
The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the glittering shooter of arrows.
'Have you . . .?' changed to me, was the signification understood.
'Can you?—for life'. Do you think you can?'
His poverty in the pleading language melted her.
'What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a throne, with you petitioning. Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine, if you hold it worthy of you. We will speak of that. Now tell me the name of the weed trailing along the hedge there!
He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion baffled him. It was clematis, he said.