“Forgive me!” he said.  “You are angry because I called you—­Ida!  It was wrong and presumptuous; but I have learned to think of you by your name—­and it slipped out.  Are you very angry?  Ah, you knew why I called you so?  Don’t you know that—­I love you!”

She raised her eyes for a moment but did not look at him; they were fixed dreamily on the great hills in the distance, then drooped again, and her brows came together, her lips straightened with a still more marked expression of trouble, doubt, and wonder.

“I love you,” he said, with the deep note of a man’s passion in his voice.  “I didn’t mean to tell you, to speak—­I didn’t know until just now how it was with me:  you see I am telling you everything, the whole truth!  You will listen to me?”

For she had made a movement of turning away, a slow, heavy gesture as if she were encumbered by chains, as if she were under some spell from which she could not wake.

“I will tell you everything, at the risk of making you angry, at the risk of your—­sending me away.”

He paused for a moment, as if he were choosing his words with a care that sprang from his fear lest he should indeed rouse her anger and—­lose her.

“The first day I saw you—­you remember?”

As if she could forget!  She knew as he asked the question that no trifling detail of that first meeting was forgotten, that every word was engraven on her memory.

“When I saw you riding down the hill, I thought I had never seen any girl so beautiful, so lovely—­”

The colour rose slowly to her face, but died away again:  the least vain of women is moved when a man tells her she is beautiful—­in his eyes, at any rate.

“And when you spoke to me I thought I had never heard so sweet a voice; and if I had, that there had never been one that I so longed to hear again.  You were not with me long, only a few minutes, but when I left you and trumped over the hill to the inn I could not get you out of my mind.  I wondered who you were, and whether I should see you again.”  The horses moved, and instinctively she looked over her shoulder towards them.

“They will not go:  they are quite quiet,” he said.  “Wait—­ah, wait for a few minutes!  I have a feeling that if I let you go I shall not see you again; and that would—­that would be more than I could bear.  That night at the inn the landlord told me about you.  Of course he had nothing but praise and admiration for you—­who would have any other?  But he told me of the lonely life you led, of the care you took of your father, of your devotion and goodness; and the picture of you living at the great, silent house, without friends or companions—­well, it haunted me!  I could see it all so plainly—­I, who am not usually quick at seeing things.  As a rule, I’m not impressed by women—­Howard says I am cold and bored—­perhaps he’s right; but I could not get you out of my mind.  I felt that I wanted to see you again.”