She stamped her foot: "I won't have my sword returned to me in that fashion. And you know perfectly well it wasn't cowardice; that I can't call you back, ever, in case you might be gone for good."
"Do you mean to say," in blank astonishment, "that if it were for good, you'd have let me walk out in that casual fashion?"
"'According to the letter of the bond,'" she quoted.
He kicked the sodden leaves with his heel; picked up a stick and swished it at the air; burst forth at length: "Hang it, Peter! I showed you the exit-door once, and you've kept your eye glued to it ever since. Forget it, can't you?"
"It was an insult ever to point it out. Because there was no need for it. I wouldn't have tugged."
"I know that--now," his accents were almost humble; "but you see, Peter, there have been other she-encounters, and ... and they didn't know about the door. So I suppose I grew mistrustful."
"Yes. I'm sorry. Please, Peter, join me in my ditch."
So she laughed, and crossed the road to his side. And a little further up the hill, they found a tinker in the ditch, and tried to make him talk like the tinkers of J. M. Synge and Jeffrey Farnol and Borrow and Hilaire Belloc, and other welkinistic writers. But this was Just a tinker; a man of no conversation and apparently no philosophy. So in disgust they left him; and, climbing a stile, struck out across the Weald, sweet with the hot sweet smell of trodden fern; before them in the East a threatening pall of cloud hung low and grey over the landscape; and behind them, where they could not see it, the sun flooded the same landscape in slanting gold, which gave a curiously sinister effect to the whole. Then a steep descent plunged them head foremost into a labyrinth of bushes; netted undergrowth, which they were compelled to butt through darkly, with snapping of twigs and branches to mark each outward step; till at last, scratched and torn and out of breath, they stood in the lane on the further side.
Stuart swung himself over a formidable gate which barred the further end of the lane, and waited for Peter to follow. After one or two attempts, she saw it was beyond her accomplishment.
"I give it up, Stuart,--no, I'm hanged if I do!" impetuously, meeting his quizzical look.... Then drew back: "I'm not so afraid of you but that I can own to being beaten," she said.