He paused and regarded the ground before him—­thoughtfully.

“Life,” said Cecily, “has either got to be religious or else it goes to pieces....  Perhaps anyhow it goes to pieces....”

Mr. Direck endorsed these observations by a slow nodding of the head.

He allowed a certain interval to elapse.  Then a vaguely apprehended purpose that had been for a time forgotten in these higher interests came back to him.  He took it up with a breathless sense of temerity.

“Well,” he said, “then you don’t hate me?”

She smiled.

“You don’t dislike me or despise me?”

She was still reassuring.

“You don’t think I’m just a slow American sort of portent?”

“No.”

“You think, on the whole, I might even—­someday—?”

She tried to meet his eyes with a pleasant frankness, and perhaps she was franker than she meant to be.

“Look here,” said Mr. Direck, with a little quiver of emotion softening his mouth.  “I’ll ask you something.  We’ve got to wait.  Until you feel clearer.  Still....  Could you bring yourself—?  If just once—­I could kiss you....

“I’m going away to Germany,” he went on to her silence.  “But I shan’t be giving so much attention to Germany as I supposed I should when I planned it out.  But somehow—­if I felt—­that I’d kissed you....”

With a delusive effect of calmness the young lady looked first over her left shoulder and then over her right and surveyed the park about them.  Then she stood up.  “We can go that way home,” she said with a movement of her head, “through the little covert.”

Mr. Direck stood up too.

“If I was a poet or a bird,” said Mr. Direck, “I should sing.  But being just a plain American citizen all I can do is just to talk about all I’d do if I wasn’t....”

And when they had reached the little covert, with its pathway of soft moss and its sheltering screen of interlacing branches, he broke the silence by saying, “Well, what’s wrong with right here and now?” and Cecily stood up to him as straight as a spear, with gifts in her clear eyes.  He took her soft cool face between his trembling hands, and kissed her sweet half-parted lips.  When he kissed her she shivered, and he held her tighter and would have kissed her again.  But she broke away from him, and he did not press her.  And muter than ever, pondering deeply, and secretly trembling in the queerest way, these two outwardly sedate young people returned to the Dower House....

And after tea the taxicab from the junction came for him and he vanished, and was last seen as a waving hat receding along the top of the dog-rose hedge that ran beyond the hockey field towards the village.

“He will see Germany long before I shall,” said Herr Heinrich with a gust of nostalgia.  “I wish almost I had not agreed to go to Boulogne.”

And for some days Miss Cecily Corner was a very grave and dignified young woman indeed.  Pondering....