'I must. She wants me.'
'Oh Anna, so do I. But 'twill be a new habit for you to want me. Well, I'll wait.'
'Until I go and come?'
'Just so,' he said and laughed joyously.
But she was already blushing at her own words, and his laugh, setting free as it seemed to do his own wild emotion and her surrender, made her shrink into herself.
'Oh! not to-night. How could I come back to-night? It's getting late, it's——' she said incoherently, and wrung her hand out of his.
Not before he had bent close to her.
'But I shall wait. I have and I will in every way,' he said in a whisper. She gave him one glance, hurried, misty; a smile set in tears; passed him and was gone.
He leant against the gate, watching and waiting, scanning the house. Mrs. Severn had disappeared. No one was visible. It grew dusk. A bat flitted round him. The murmur of the beck on the sweet still air was every moment clearer as it sang its 'quiet tune' to the 'sleeping woods.' Surely she would come.