“I’ve plenty to do.”

“Well, it seems to agree with you—­I never saw anyone look finer.  You’re reelly a wonder, old thing.”

He picked up the large hand lying on the table-cloth and kissed it back and palm.  From any other man, even from Martin himself, she would have received the caress quite simply, been proud and contented, but now it brought her into a strange trouble.  She leaned towards him, falling upon his shoulder, her face against his neck.  She wanted his kisses, and he gave them to her.

At about three o’clock they set out again.  The sun was high now, but the air was cooler, for it had lost its stillness and blew in rippling gusts from the sea.  Joanna resolved not to go on to New Romney, as they had waited too long at Lydd; so she took the road that goes to Ivychurch, past Midley chapel, one of the ruined shrines of the monks of Canterbury—­grey walls huddled against a white tower of hawthorn in which the voices of the birds tinkled like little bells.

She was now beginning to feel more happy and self-confident but she was still preoccupied, though with a new situation.  They had now been alone together for five hours, and Albert had not said a word about the marriage on which her hopes were set.  Her ideas as to her own right of initiative had undergone a change.  He was in all matters of love so infinitely more experienced than she was that she could no longer imagine herself taking the lead.  Hitherto she had considered herself as experienced and capable in love as in other things—­had she not been engaged for five months?  Had she not received at least half a dozen offers of marriage?  But Albert had “learned her different.”  His sure, almost careless, touch abashed her, and the occasional fragments of autobiography which he let fall, showed her that she was a limited and ignorant recluse compared to this boy of twenty-five.  In matters of money and achievement she might brag, but in matters of love she was strangely subservient to him, because in such matters he had everything to teach her.

They stopped for tea at Ivychurch; the little inn and the big church beside the New Sewer were hazed over in a cloud of floating sunshine and dust.  She had been here before with Martin, and after tea she and Albert went into the church and looked around them.  But his interest in old places was not the same as Martin’s.  He called things “quaint” and “rummy,” and quoted anything he had read about them in the guide-book, but he could not make them come alive in a strange re-born youth—­he could not make her feel the beauty of the great sea on which the French ships had ridden, or the splendours of the Marsh before the Flood, with all its towns and taverns and steeples.  Unconsciously she missed this appeal to her sleeping imagination, and her bringing of him into the great church, which could have held an the village in its aisles, was an effort to supply what was lacking.

But Albert’s attitude towards the church was critical and unsatisfactory.  It was much too big for the village.  It was ridiculous ... that little clump of chairs in all the huge emptiness ... what a waste of money, paying a parson to idle away his time among a dozen people....  “How Dreadful is this Place” ran the painted legend over the arches....  Joanna trembled.