“Yes?”
“Take up your work again. Go on writing.”
She hesitated. “Does it matter?” she asked, with a dreary smile.
“That doesn’t matter. I want a definite promise.”
She was silent a moment. “Very well, I’ll try,” she answered at last, steadily.
He nodded satisfaction. “That’s good enough for me. I’m not afraid,” he returned, and moved from the stile.
They began to wade through the sea of grasses towards the garden, whose belt of trees lay at no great distance.
“Look here, Cis!” he began, so suddenly that she started, and, glancing up, saw him squaring his shoulders in the resolute way for which as a girl she had often teased him. “There’s something I want to say to you. All of us—all of us, at least, who matter—get a hard knock from life some time or other, and if it’s hard enough most of us go to pieces for a bit. I went to pieces once.”
Cecily nervously pulled the rosy beads off a head of sorrel as she passed it, but he went straight on. “You have been going to pieces for quite a considerable time. Oh, yes, I know,” as he saw her shrink a little. “But this is a straight talk. Now what’s the good of going to pieces, Cis? It doesn’t alter anything except oneself, and one’s chance of getting something, if not the thing we want, out of existence. Life gives hard blows. Very well, then, let us go out to meet it, in armor. I want you to get a suit, Cis.” He paused abruptly.
“The people who wear armor are not, as a rule, engaging,” she said, with an attempt at a smile.