Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and seeing his look she paled a little.

“Do you guess at all why it hurts me to jar with you?” he said—­finding his words in a rush, he did not know how—­“Why every syllable of yours matters to me?  It is because I have hopes—­dreams—­which have become my life!  If you could accept this—­this—­feeling—­this devotion—­which has grown up in me—­if you could trust yourself to me—­you should have no cause, I think—­ever—­to think me hard or narrow towards any person, any enthusiasm for which you had sympathy.  May I say to you all that is in my mind—­or—­or—­am I presuming?”

She looked away from him, crimson again.  A great wave of exultation—­boundless, intoxicating—­swept through her.  Then it was checked by a nobler feeling—­a quick, penitent sense of his nobleness.

“You don’t know me,” she said hurriedly:  “you think you do.  But I am all odds and ends.  I should annoy—­wound—­disappoint you.”

His quiet grey eyes flamed.

“Come and sit down here, on these dry roots,” he said, taking already joyous command of her.  “We shall be undisturbed.  I have so much to say!”

She obeyed trembling.  She felt no passion, but the strong thrill of something momentous and irreparable, together with a swelling pride—­pride in such homage from such a man.

He led her a few steps down the slope, found a place for her against a sheltering trunk, and threw himself down beside her.  As he looked up at the picture she made amid the autumn branches, at her bent head, her shy moved look, her white hand lying ungloved on her black dress, happiness overcame him.  He took her hand, found she did not resist, drew it to him, and clasping it in both his, bent his brow, his lips upon it.  It shook in his hold, but she was passive.  The mixture of emotion and self-control she showed touched him deeply.  In his chivalrous modesty he asked for nothing else, dreamt of nothing more.

Half an hour later they were still in the same spot.  There had been much talk between them, most of it earnest, but some of it quite gay, broken especially by her smiles.  Her teasing mood, however, had passed away.  She was instead composed and dignified, like one conscious that life had opened before her to great issues.

Yet she had flinched often before that quiet tone of eager joy in which he had described his first impressions of her, his surprise at finding in her ideals, revolts, passions, quite unknown to him, so far, in the women of his own class.  Naturally he suppressed, perhaps he had even forgotten, the critical amusement and irritation she had often excited in him.  He remembered, he spoke only of sympathy, delight, pleasure—­of his sense, as it were, of slaking some long-felt moral thirst at the well of her fresh feeling.  So she had attracted him first,—­by a certain strangeness and daring—­by what she said—­