"You are not serious?" he demanded. "Perfectly," she assured him. "I can't think how I forgot it."
"Does he come here to see you?" Burton asked, jealously.
"Not very often. He has to work hard." Burton leaned back in his seat. The music of life seemed suddenly to be playing afar off--so far that he could only dimly catch the strains. The wind, too, must have changed--the perfume of the roses reached him no more.
"I thought you understood," he said slowly.
She did not speak again for several moments. Then she rose a little abruptly to her feet.
"You can walk as far as the hayfield with me," she said.
They passed down the narrow garden path in single file. There had been a storm in the night and the beds of pink and white stocks lay dashed and drooping with a weight of glistening rain-drops. The path was strewn with rose petals and the air seemed fuller than ever of a fresh and delicate fragrance. At the end of the garden, a little gate led into the orchard. Side by side they passed beneath the trees.
"Tell me," he begged in a low tone, "about this lover of yours!"
"There is so little to tell," she answered. "He is a member of the firm who publish books for my father. He is quite kind to us both. He used to come down here more often, even, than he does now, and one night he asked my father whether he might speak to me."
"My father was very much pleased," she continued. "We have little money and father is not very strong. He told me that it had taken a weight off his mind."
"Last Sunday week! And you call him your lover!"
"No, I have not called him that," she reminded him gently. "He is not that sort of man. Only I think that he is the person whom I shall marry--some day."
"I am sure that you were beginning to like me," he insisted.
She turned and looked at him--at his pale, eager face with the hollow eyes, the tremulous mouth--a curiously negative and wholly indescribable figure, yet in some dim sense impressive through certain unspelt suggestions of latent force. No one could have described him, in those days, though no one with perceptions could have failed to observe much that was unusual in his personality.
"It is true," she admitted. "I do like you. You seem to carry some quality with you which I do not understand. What is it, I wonder? It is something which reminds me of your writing."