And then indeed he meant it.

“Marry me,” he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at the end of the garden.  “And we will go together.”

He seized her arm and drew her to him.  “I love you,” he said.  “I love your spirit.  You are not like any one else.”

There was a moment’s hesitation.

Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.

Then they turned their dusky faces to each other.  He drew her still closer.

“Oh!” she said, and yielded herself to be kissed.  Their lips touched, and for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.

“I want you,” he whispered close to her.  “You are my mate.  From the first sight of you I knew that. . . .”

They embraced—­alertly furtive.

Then they stood a little apart.  Some one was coming towards them.  Amanda’s bearing changed swiftly.  She put up her little face to his, confidently and intimately.

“Don’t tell any one,” she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to emphasize her words.  “Don’t tell any one—­not yet.  Not for a few days. . . .”

She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty appeared in a little path between the artichokes and raspberry canes.

“Listening to the nightingales?” cried Betty.

“Yes, aren’t they?” said Amanda inconsecutively.

“That’s our very own nightingale!” cried Betty advancing.  “Do you hear it, Mr. Benham?  No, not that one.  That is a quite inferior bird that performs in the vicarage trees. . . .”

11

When a man has found and won his mate then the best traditions demand a lyrical interlude.  It should be possible to tell, in that ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy lover.  This at any rate was what White had always done in his novels hitherto, and what he would certainly have done at this point had he had the telling of Benham’s story uncontrolledly in his hands.  But, indeed, indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart has not this simplicity.  Only the heroes of romance, and a few strong simple clean-shaven Americans have that much emotional integrity. (And even the Americans do at times seem to an observant eye to be putting in work at the job and keeping up their gladness.) Benham was excited that night, but not in the proper bright-eyed, red-cheeked way; he did not dance down the village street of Harting to his harbour at the Ship, and the expression in his eyes as he sat on the edge of his bed was not the deep elemental wonder one could have wished there, but amazement.  Do not suppose that he did not love Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not triumphantly glad to have won her, that the image of the two armour-clad lovers was not still striding