Making love is a very good way to pass the time, above all when that same time presses and other disconcerting things should be spoken of instead; and this device Robin now learned.  He spoke of a hundred things that were of no importance:  of the dress that she wore—­russet, as it should be, for country girls, with the loose sleeves folded back above her elbows that she might handle the linen; her apron of coarse linen, her steel-buckled shoes.  He told her that he loved her better in that than in her costume of state—­the ruff, the fardingale, the brocaded petticoat, and all the rest—­in which he had seen her once last summer at Babington House.  He talked then, when she would hear no more of that, of Tuesday seven-night, when they would meet for hawking in the lower chase of the Padley estates; and proceeded then to speak of Agnes, whom he had left on the fist of the man who had taken his mare, of her increasing infirmities and her crimes of crabbing; and all the while he held her left hand in both of his, and fitted her fingers between his, and kissed them again when he had no more to say on any one point; and wondered why he could not speak of the matter on which he had come, and how he should tell her.  And then at last she drew it from him.

“And now, my Robin,” she said, “tell me what you have in your mind.  You have talked of this and that and Agnes and Jock, and Padley chase, and you have not once looked me in the eyes since you first came in.”

Now it was not shame that had held him from telling her, but rather a kind of bewilderment.  The affair might hold shame, indeed, or anger, or sorrow, or complacence, but he did not know; and he wished, as young men of decent birth should wish, to present the proper emotion on its right occasion.  He had pondered on the matter continually since his father had spoken to him on Saint Stephen’s night; and at one time it seemed that his father was acting the part of a traitor and at another of a philosopher.  If it were indeed true, after all, that all men were turning Protestant, and that there was not so much difference between the two religions, then it would be the act of a wise man to turn Protestant too, if only for a while.  And on the other hand his pride of birth and his education by his mother and his practice ever since drew him hard the other way.  He was in a strait between the two.  He did not know what to think, and he feared what Marjorie might think.

It was this, then, that had held him silent.  He feared what Marjorie might think, for that was the very thing that he thought that he thought too, and he foresaw a hundred inconveniences and troubles if it were so.

“How did you know I had anything in my mind?” he asked.  “Is it not enough reason for my coming that you should be here?”

She laughed softly, with a pleasant scornfulness.

“I read you like a printed book,” she said.  “What else are women’s wits given them for?”