He pressed her hand. ‘It is a solemn promise,’ he replied. ‘Now I must go, for you know your way.’
‘I shall hardly believe that it has not been all a dream!’ she said, with a childish instinct to cry at his withdrawal. ‘There will be nothing left of last night—nothing of my dress, nothing of my pleasure, nothing of the place!’
‘You shall remember it in this way,’ said he. ‘We’ll cut our initials on this tree as a memorial, so that whenever you walk this path you will see them.’
Then with a knife he inscribed on the smooth bark of a beech tree the letters M.T., and underneath a large X.
‘What, have you no Christian name, sir?’ she said.
‘Yes, but I don’t use it. Now, good-bye, my little friend.—What will you do with yourself to-day, when you are gone from me?’ he lingered to ask.
‘Oh—I shall go to my granny’s,’ she replied with some gloom; ‘and have breakfast, and dinner, and tea with her, I suppose; and in the evening I shall go home to Silverthorn Dairy, and perhaps Jim will come to meet me, and all will be the same as usual.’
‘Who is Jim?’
‘O, he’s nobody—only the young man I’ve got to marry some day.’
‘What!—you engaged to be married?—Why didn’t you tell me this before?’