They went forward more hurriedly till, with a sense of escape from a funnel, they came out into the road. Here, pausing, she looked up and down; nothing beckoned in either direction, though she stood expectantly as though a paradisial perspective should have opened up for them. It was the same road, not to be changed for her, with its double rank of trees, its villa gates somnolently ajar and its same air of stretching mildly ahead to be sauntered on. The chestnuts already were budding; soon, sign that the visitors must be gone, they would roof the road over with their interknit fingery leaves. The air about them was gummy, smelling faintly of spring. He caught his breath sharply – was this moment also, like that other, slipping away to torment him?

‘I shall be sorry,’ he said, ‘when we’ve gone. One might easily be so happy here. It can’t, while one’s here, be impossible. It will be fatal to go. The thought of those leaves coming out has a kind of taint about it, like autumn.’

She looked at him doubtfully, with a twitch of the lips at the thought that might well have been scorn. ‘Mr Milton,’ she asked, ‘do you still want to marry me?’

‘Let’s walk on,’ he said quickly; ‘don’t let’s just – just stand here … Either way – this way, then. Oughtn’t we, don’t you think, to walk on?’

‘Do please try and answer,’ said she, ‘you embarrass me fearfully.’

An instinct made him catch at her elbow and guide her, as they walked, as though between puddles. He felt her elbow shake.

‘You know I love you,’ he said, and was startled by the ring of this avowal, the certainty. ‘Sydney, Sydney,’ he sighed, and felt at the back of closed eyes her white face and dark eyes looking up.

He looked at her again and for a moment she was nothing but a girl talking. ‘I will marry you,’ she was saying then; ‘I do want to.’

Why was she quick to assure him of this? He met her eyes, straight, searching up for him, eyes nearly black, overcharged, impenetrable, crying out to be read. ‘You don’t love me?’ he said – ‘I mean, do you?’

‘Oh, no.’ She seemed appalled at the misapprehension, but her elbow, rigid in his slackening grasp, asked not to be relinquished. ‘But you know, I do want to,’ she said.

‘My dear Sydney …’ Saying this, he turned to look instinctively up and down the empty road.

‘Yes, you could kiss me here,’ she said, ‘if there’s nobody coming.’ He stooped quickly and kissed her.

‘I think there was somebody’ – she laughed a moment afterwards, with embarrassment – ‘looking through the gate of the villa. Shall we walk on, looking rather ordinary?’ After a little of this ‘ordinary’ walking on she asked with anxiety, ‘You did really want to marry me, didn’t you?’