“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur.  “I thought we should never get ’em all to the top.  But I’m glad we came, by Jove!  I wouldn’t have missed this for something.”

“I don’t like Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently.  “I suppose he’s very clever, but why should clever people be so—­I expect he’s awfully nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.

“Hirst?  Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur indifferently.  “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it.  You should hear him talking to Elliot.  It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all. . . .  I was never good at my books.”

With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.

“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him.  “It’s jolly in the shade—­and the view—­” They sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for some time.

“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked.  “I don’t suppose they ever . . .”  He did not finish his sentence.

“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great sincerity.

“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur.  “One goes along smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it used to seem.  Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I seemed to see everything as if—­” he paused and plucked a piece of grass up by the roots.  He scattered the little lumps of earth which were sticking to the roots—­“As if it had a kind of meaning.  You’ve made the difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you.  I’ve felt it ever since I knew you. . . .  It’s because I love you.”

Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human being had ever come so close to her before.

She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave great separate leaps at the last words.  She sat with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over the plain.  So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted.  She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.

“You might have known.”  He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.

“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.”  He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.