“A fortnight’s holiday, Raymond!”

“Yes—­that’s not very wonderful, is it?  But, of course, you can’t understand what this work is to me, because you look at it from a different angle.  Anyway I want a holiday—­to get right away and consider things; and he won’t let me have it.  And finding that, I lost my temper.  And if, at the present moment, Daniel hears that we’re engaged to be married, Sabina, it’s about fifty to one that he’d chuck me altogether and stop my dirty little allowance also.”

They had reached the gate of ‘The Magnolias,’ and Sabina did a startling thing.  She turned from him and went down the path to the back entrance without another word.  But this he could not stand.  His heart smote him and he called her with such emotion that she also was sorrowful and came back to the gate.

“Good God! you frightened me,” he said.  “This is a quarrel, Sabina—­our first and last, I hope.  Never, never let anything come between us.  That’s unthinkable and I won’t have it.  You must give and take, my precious girl.  And so must I. But look at it.  What on earth happens to us if Daniel fires me out of the Mill?”

“He’s a just man,” she answered.  “Dislike him as we may, he’s a just man and you need not fear him, or anybody else, if you do the right thing.”

“You oppose your will to mine, then, Sabina?”

“I don’t know your will.  I thought I did; I thought I understood you so well by now and was learning better and better how to please you.  But now I tell you I am being wronged, and you say nothing can be done.”

“I never said so.  I’m not a blackguard, Sabina, and you ought to know that as well as the rest of the world.  I’m poor, unfortunately, and the poor have got to be politic.  Daniel may be just, but it’s a narrow-minded, hypocritical justice, and if I tell him I’m engaged to you, he’ll sack me.  That’s the plain English of it.”

“I don’t believe he would.”

“Well, I know he would; and you must at least allow me to know more about him than you do.  And so I ask you whether it is common-sense to tell him what’s going to happen, for the sake of a few clod-hoppers, who matter to nobody, or—­”

“But, but, how long is it to go on?  Why do you shrink from doing now what you wanted to do at first?”

“I don’t shrink from it at all.  I only intend to choose the proper time and not give the show away at a moment when to do so will be to ruin me.”

“‘Give the show away,’” she quoted bitterly.  “You can look me in the face and say a thing like that!  It’s only ‘a show’ to you; but it’s my life to me.”

“I’m sorry I used the expression.  Words aren’t anything.  It’s my life to me, too.  And I’ve got to think for both of us.  In a week, or ten days, I’ll eat humble pie and climb down and grovel to Daniel.  Then, when I’m pardoned, we’ll tell everybody.  It won’t kill you to wait another fortnight anyway.  And in the meantime we’d better see less of each other, since you’re getting so worried about what your friends say about us.”