At that, paralysis fell on her.  She stared out of the scented shadow in which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away, wavering like upright serpents in the heated air.  Her heart seemed about to burst.  Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its cause.  He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair.  When she looked at him he stopped and muttered, “Well, good-bye.  It’s time I was getting along,” and walked away.  From the shadow she had watched him with an inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority.  A year later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed.  He murmured teasingly, “Maid Marion!  Maid Marion!” and laughed, and she had looked up into his eyes.  Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent.  It was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.

With her he had delightedly discovered love.  Indeed, she had had such a courtship that she need envy no other woman hers.  For all about her days with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer’s daughter of seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip:  the quality of a fair dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action.  She should have been well pleased.  Yet she knew now that the occasion would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had looked up into Richard’s eyes.  They would not have been innocent, they would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine.  But they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all his adventures.  Besides, Richard’s eyes were so marvellously black....  She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him that laughter was the just final comment on life.  But she knew quite well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more beautifully than she had ever been.