“Oh, Dick!” she said.
“I want,” he stammered, “to be everything to you. Do you think I shall?”
“Of course!”
Of course! The words seemed very much or very little.
She looked down at the river, gleaming below the glade in a curving silver line. “Dick, there are such a lot of splendid things that we might do.”
Did she mean, amongst those splendid things, that they might understand each other; or were they fated to pretend to only, in the old time-honoured way?
They crossed the river by a ferry, and rode a long time in silence, while the twilight slowly fell behind the aspens. And all the beauty of the evening, with its restless leaves, its grave young moon, and lighted campion flowers, was but a part of her; the scents, the witchery and shadows, the quaint field noises, the yokels' whistling, and the splash of water-fowl, each seemed to him enchanted. The flighting bats, the forms of the dim hayricks, and sweet-brier perfume-she summed them all up in herself. The fingermarks had deepened underneath her eyes, a languor came upon her; it made her the more sweet and youthful. Her shoulders seemed to bear on them the very image of our land—grave and aspiring, eager yet contained—before there came upon that land the grin of greed, the folds of wealth, the simper of content. Fair, unconscious, free!
And he was silent, with a beating heart.