‘But James, for a clergyman’s wife – I can’t wear scarlet and flame colour. Your life——’

‘Do you think of that as muddled and dark?’ he said, realizing how little they knew of each other, and how difficult it would be for her ever to know him.

‘I don’t think of it, I think of you. I confess I don’t half like the sound of it.’

‘But, Sydney——’ He glanced round a moment as though Mrs Kerr were behind him, smiling at Sydney.

‘But we’re going to live it. Any life would look bad from the brink; if we had to make the decision we’d probably never be born. But most lives are the same, I’m sure once one’s in mid-stream. Ours will be lovely. But you won’t see me often again in a Roman scarf.’

‘Don’t change, don’t be different,’ he cried. ‘I love you so much as you are.’ She looked at him in reproach: at that moment he loved her as sharply as though she already were lost to him. He snatched at the moment, and letting go of everything asked to be carried away by it; shutting his eyes to be nearer and holding her close. They were both blotted out, himself and herself were forgotten: he came to a brink.

Time carried him on again after he could not say how long a cessation of being. He knew that through all this the hill had been waiting with their two figures upon it framed in solitude. Coming back to her there in his arms at a sound or a movement she made, he did not dare to ask her where she had been. Eye to eye they looked at each other questioningly, as though trying to learn from one another if they had been together; then each looked away, as though afraid to read they had been forgotten.

‘I’m rather afraid,’ she said, making a movement to break away from him, and in answer to all his questions kept repeating, ‘I am rather afraid.’ He could smile at this, feeling exalted; he let her go, but later drew an arm of hers through his own, and made her walk on again. Her air was irresolute; she seemed to be trying to shape her thoughts into words. She said at last, having looked again at him solemnly as though enjoining him to understand this better than she could, ‘Haven’t we – or I, at least, for my part – undertaken rather too much?’

He saw some shadow of what she meant but nothing more than a shadow. He was inclined to take her gesture as traditional, her mood as generic; she was a young woman – very young as a woman. With compressed lips she withdrew her arm. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘why should I ask you? The difficulty is my own.’