Rowcliffe didn’t want to stay out too long in the orchard.  He knew that the window of the Vicar’s study raked it.  So he asked Mary if she would come with him for a stroll. (His only criticism of Mary was that she didn’t walk enough.)

Mary thought, “My nice frock will be ruined if the rain comes.”  But she went.

“Shall it be the moor or the fields?” he said.

Mary thought again, and said, “The fields.”

He was glad she hadn’t said “The moor.”

They strolled past the village and turned into the pasture that lay between the high road and the beck.  The narrow paths led up a slope from field to field through the gaps in the stone walls.  The fields turned with the turning of the dale and with that turning of the road that Rowcliffe knew, under Karva.  Instinctively, with a hand on her arm he steered her, away from the high road and its turning, toward the beck, so that they had their backs to the thunder storm as it came up over Karva and the High Moor.

It was when they were down in the bottom that it burst.

There was shelter on the further side of the last field.  They ran to it, climbed, and crouched together under the stone wall.

Rowcliffe took off the light overcoat he wore and tried to put it on her.  But Mary wouldn’t let him.  She looked at his clothes, at the round dinner jacket with its silk collar and at the beautiful evening trousers with their braided seams.  He insisted.  She refused.  He insisted still, and compromised by laying the overcoat round both of them.

And they crouched together under the wall, sitting closer so that the coat might cover them.

It thundered and lightened.  The rain pelted them from the high batteries of Karva.  And Rowcliffe drew Mary closer.  She laughed like a happy child.

Rowcliffe sighed.

It was after he had sighed that he kissed her under the cover of the coat.

* * * * *

They sat there for half an hour; three-quarters; till the storm ceased with the rising of the moon.

* * * * *

“I’m afraid the pretty frock’s spoiled,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter.  Your poor suit’s ruined.”

He laughed.

“Whatever’s been ruined,” he said, “it was worth it.”

Hand in hand they went back together through the drenched fields.

At the first gap he stopped.

“It’s settled?” he said.  “You won’t go back on it?  You do care for me?  And you will marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Soon?”

“Yes; soon.”

At the last gap he stopped again.

“Mary,” he said, “I suppose you knew about Gwenda?”

“I knew there was something.  What was it?”

He had said to himself, “I shall have to tell her.  I shall have to say I cared for her.”

What he did say was, “There was nothing in it.  It’s all over.  It was all over long ago.”