In his excitement he spoke on.  “Of course they both wanted you.  I could see that little snipe Philip did.  And everything you told me about them proves it.  And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you if he’d been young.”

Ellen repeated wistfully, “They wanted me.”  She did not know what it meant, but accepted it.

A sudden hush fell on his vehemence.  He turned away from her again, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane.  “Don’t you know what that means?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, Lord!” he said.  “I wasn’t sure.  How frightened you must be.”

In the thinnest thread of sound, she murmured:  “Sometimes.  A little.”

He was trembling.  “You poor thing.  You poor little thing.  Yet I can’t tell you.”

She clapped her hands over her ears.  “Ah, no.  I couldn’t bear to listen if you did.”  They sank into a trembling silence.  Her black eyes, fixed on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in them proofs that the core of life was darkness.  There came on her suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard.  She remembered it with a singular lack of dismay.  There ran through her on the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had fallen down about her shoulders.  They stood easily together in the light of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head, he looking down on the disordered glory.

“But what’s that for?” he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the middle of the floor.

Her eyes filled with tears.  “I was packing to go back to Edinburgh.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear!” he said solemnly.  “I came near to imperilling a perfect thing.”  He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss her, but she started away from him.

“Oh, maircy!  What cold hands!” she exclaimed.

“I’ve been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle.  It was freezing.  And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and shaking with rage.”

“You poor silly thing!” she cried lovingly.  “Give me yon bits of ice!” She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.

For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great for him to bear, and he whispered:  “This is all it is!  This is all it is!”

“What do you mean?” she murmured.

“What you fear ... is just like this.  You will comfort my whole body as you are comforting my hands....”