* * * * *

Well, ten days passed, sometimes we met at breakfast, sometimes at supper, sometimes we fished together or sat in the straggling orchard and talked; she neither avoided me nor sought me.  She is the most charming mixture of child and woman I ever met.  She is a dual creature.  Now I never met that in a man.  When she is here without getting a letter in the morning or going to town, she seems like a girl.  She runs about in her grey gown and little cap and laughs, and seems to throw off all thought like an irresponsible child.  She is eager to fish, or pick gooseberries and eat them daintily, or sit under the trees and talk.  But when she goes to town—­I notice she always goes when she gets a lawyer’s letter, there is no mistaking the envelope—­she comes home tired and haggard-looking, an old woman of thirty-five.  I wonder why.  It takes her, even with her elasticity of temperament, nearly a day to get young again.  I hate her to go to town; it is extraordinary how I miss her; I can’t recall, when she is absent, her saying anything very wonderful, but she converses all the time.  She has a gracious way of filling the place with herself, there is an entertaining quality in her very presence.  We had one rainy afternoon; she tied me some flies (I shan’t use any of them); I watched the lights in her hair as she moved, it is quite golden in some places, and she has a tiny mole near her left ear and another on her left wrist.  On the eleventh day she got a letter but she didn’t go to town, she stayed up in her room all day; twenty times I felt inclined to send her a line, but I had no excuse.  I heard the landlady say as I passed the kitchen window:  ’Poor dear!  I’m sorry to lose her!’ Lose her?  I should think not.  It has come to this with me that I don’t care to face any future without her; and yet I know nothing about her, not even if she is a free woman.  I shall find that out the next time I see her.  In the evening I catch a glimpse of her gown in the orchard, and I follow her.  We sit down near the river.  Her left hand is lying gloveless next to me in the grass.

’Do you think from what you have seen of me, that I would ask a question out of any mere impertinent curiosity?’

She starts.  ‘No, I do not!’

I take up her hand and touch the ring.  ’Tell me, does this bind you to any one?’

I am conscious of a buzzing in my ears and a dancing blurr of water and sky and trees, as I wait (it seems to me an hour) for her reply.  I felt the same sensation once before, when I got drawn into some rapids and had an awfully narrow shave, but of that another time.

The voice is shaking.

‘I am not legally bound to anyone, at least; but why do you ask?’ she looks me square in the face as she speaks, with a touch of haughtiness I never saw in her before.

Perhaps the great relief I feel, the sense of joy at knowing she is free, speaks out of my face, for hers flushes and she drops her eyes, her lips tremble.  I don’t look at her again, but I can see her all the same.  After a while she says—­