"Don't talk of it!" said Barbara.
Her hand tightened on his arm, and she looked up at him, with a glance that said plainly that the sun would drop out of her sky if any mischance befell him.
"Well," she said, after a minute, more in her ordinary voice, as if she were dismissing Reynold Harding from the conversation, "I'm glad you know. I wanted you to know, but of course I could not tell you."
"It's wonderful with women," said Adrian, gliding easily into generalities, "the things they don't think it necessary to tell us, taking it for granted that we know them, and we can't know them and don't know them to our dying day—and the things they do think it necessary to tell us, with elaborate precautions and explanations—which we knew perfectly well from the first."
"Oh, is that it?" Barbara replied, smartly. "Then I shall tell you everything, and you can be surprised or not as you please."
"I sha'n't be much surprised," said Adrian, "unless, perhaps, you tell me something when you think you are not telling anything at all."
And with this they went off together to look at the seat in which he sat when Barbara saw him first, and then she stood in her old place in the Rothwells' red-lined pew, and looked across at him, recalling that summer Sunday. It would have been a delightful amusement if the church had been a few degrees warmer, but Barbara could not help shivering a little, and Adrian frankly avowed that he found it impossible to maintain his feelings at the proper pitch.
"I'm blue," he said, "and I'm iced, and I can't be sentimental. And you wore a thin cream-coloured dress that day, which is terrible to think of. Might write something afterwards, perhaps," he continued, musingly. "Not while my feet are like two stones, but I feel as if I might thaw into a sonnet, or something of the kind."
Barbara looked up at him reverentially, and Adrian began to laugh.
"Let's go and eat those chops," he said.