She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her face, and she answered loudly, plangently:  “Then I shall not be afraid!” They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy:  “I will marry you any day you like.”  When he answered, “No, no, I will wait,” she jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried:  “But I want to be married to you!” Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they travelled far into a new sphere of love.

It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from her.  She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested.  But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man’s form of fear.  She swung round to see what it was.

A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them.  Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with her hands.  But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet interesting and exciting.  They were both clad in uniforms cut unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor’s, and the woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were ribbons on which was printed:  “Hallelujah Army.”

The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey.  Their perfect harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure.  She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves.  There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united several qualities that one would not have thought could be found together.  She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at the shoulders as if she were fragile.  But the man was odd enough.  He was pale and had a