That night they stayed out later than they had meant.

As they touched the moor the lambs stirred at their mothers’ sides and the pewits rose and followed the white road to lure them from their secret places; they wheeled and wheeled round them, sending out their bored and weary cry.  In June the young broods kept the moor and the two were forced to the white road.

And at the turn they came in sight of Greffington Edge.

She stood still.  “Oh—­Steven—­look,” she said.

He stood with her and looked.

The moon was hidden in the haze where the gray day and the white night were mixed.  Across the bottom on the dim, watery green of the eastern slope, the thorn trees were in flower.  The hot air held them like still water.  It quivered invisibly, loosening their scent and scattering it.  And of a sudden she saw them as if thrown back to a distance where they stood enchanted in a great stillness and clearness and a piercing beauty.

There went through her a sudden deep excitement, a subtle and mysterious joy.  This passion was as distant and as pure as ecstasy.  It swept her, while the white glamour lasted, into the stillness where the flowering thorn trees stood.

* * * * *

She wondered whether Steven had seen the vision of the flowering thorn trees.  She longed for him to see it.  They stood a little apart and her hand moved toward him without touching him, as if she would draw him to the magic.

“Steven—­” she said.

He came to her.  Her hand hung limply by her side again.  She felt his hand close on it and press it.

She knew that he had seen the vision and felt the subtle and mysterious joy.

She wanted nothing more.

“Say good-night now,” she said.

“Not yet.  I’m going to walk back with you.”

They walked back in a silence that guarded the memory of the mystic thing.

They lingered a moment by the half-open door; she on the threshold, he on the garden path; the width of a flagstone separated them.

“In another minute,” she thought, “he will be gone.”

It seemed to her that he wanted to be gone and that it was she who held him there against his will and her own.

She drew the door to.

“Don’t shut it, Gwenda.”

It was as if he said, “Don’t let’s stand together out here like this any longer.”

She opened the door again, leaning a little toward it across the threshold with her hand on the latch.

She smiled, raising her chin in the distant gesture that was their signal of withdrawal.

But Steven did not go.

* * * * *

“May I come in?” he said.

Something in her said, “Don’t let him come in.”  But she did not heed it.  The voice was thin and small and utterly insignificant, as if one little brain cell had waked up and started speaking on its own account.  And something seized on her tongue and made it say “Yes,” and the full tide of her blood surged into her throat and choked it, and neither the one voice nor the other seemed to be her own.