She was sitting on the grass, leaning a little backward and supporting herself on the out-thrown struts of her arms and hands. Arthur lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Both of them were looking out across the weald to the broad, blue contours of the South Downs that determined their horizon, and hid the foundations of the massed and shining range of cumulus, slowly setting beyond. A light, cool wind was blowing up from the invisible sea, and the heat of the early July sun was screened by a thin veil of haze that trailed an immense scarf of almost transparent cloud across the sky.
Arthur was enjoying a sense of great comfort. He wanted neither to move nor to speak, and he seemed to be aware that Eleanor's inclination ran with his own. Yet he knew that the crisis could not be much longer postponed. If they merely enjoyed their pleasant idleness and returned to Hartling without having approached the important issue that had been impending ever since he had made his decision on the previous day, they would only continue in their present impossible relations. What the alternative might be he could not guess, though he had a premonition that it would not, in any case, be entirely agreeable. Some conflict was inevitable, and it must be faced. It might well be, he thought, that here on this Sussex hill, he would be confronted with a choice that would prove the turning point of his whole life.
They had sat there in absolute silence for more than ten minutes when Arthur at last said,—
"Well, shall we talk now and—and get it over?"
She did not change her position nor turn her gaze from the distances of the South Downs as she replied,—
"We will talk, but you mustn't think that we can ever 'get it over.' It will go on just the same—perhaps for years and years."
"In one sense, perhaps," he admitted, his eyes admiringly intent on her steady profile; "but it will get over this—this misunderstanding between you and me, I hope."
"It may," she said; "but you don't in the least understand yet. You don't understand, for instance, that after this, either you or I will have to leave Hartling."
He sat up with a start of surprise, and moved a little nearer to her. "But, good Lord; why?" he asked in a voice that sufficiently expressed the depth of his incomprehension.
"Because of that thing you don't know," she said, still without turning her head; "because my grandfather wants to—to throw us together." And then, having unburdened herself of this difficult essential, she continued quickly before he had time to reply, "That's why I've been given so many holidays lately, though that isn't my chief reason for knowing. Not that that matters, does it? I do know for certain; never mind how. And I have known, oh! for a month or more, though he has never said a word to me directly. So you see now, don't you, that that's a fact which makes all the difference to our talk, and how impossible it was for me to say anything to you until you knew it too?"