‘Not much against timber,’ said he.

The worthy creature’s anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers escorting dames—­an exaggeration of honest zeal; a present example of clownish goodness, it might seem; until entering the larch and firwood along the beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining of the shallow-rooted trees in a tremendous gust that quite pardoned him for curving his arm in a hoop about her and holding a shoulder in front.  The veil did her positive service.

He was honourably scrupulous not to presume.  A right good unimpulsive gentleman:  the same that she had always taken him for and liked.

‘These firs are not taproots,’ he observed, by way of apology.

Her dress volumed and her ribands rattled and chirruped on the verge of the slope.  ‘I will take your arm here,’ she said.

Redworth received the little hand, saying:  ‘Lean to me.’

They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was shaken.  But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering enemy made them one.  It might mean nothing, or everything:  to him it meant the sheer blissful instant.

At the foot of the hill, he said:  ’It’s harder to keep to, the terms of yesterday.’

‘What were they?’ said she, and took his breath more than the fury of the storm had done.

‘Raise the veil, I beg.’

‘Widows do not wear it.’

The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the glittering shooter of arrows.

‘Have you . . .?’ changed to me, was the signification understood.  ’Can you?—­for life’.  Do you think you can?’

His poverty in the pleading language melted her.

’What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a throne, with you petitioning.  Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine, if you hold it worthy of you.  We will speak of that.  Now tell me the name of the weed trailing along the hedge there!

He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion baffled him.  It was clematis, he said.

’It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to.  I passed it beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a likeness.  How foolish I was!  I could volubly sermonize; only it should be a young maid to listen.  Forgive me the yesterday.’

‘You have never to ask.  You withdraw your hand—­was I rough?’

‘No,’ she smiled demurely; ’it must get used to the shackles:  but my cottage is in sight.  I have a growing love for the place.  We will enter it like plain people—­if you think of coming in.’