“There are other people to consider,” he said:  “her relations whom I shall have to see, and a lot of things like that.  It is not like marrying a girl from the nearest village,” he added tactlessly, but without, in his self-absorption, meaning to wound.

Archelaus drew away through the night.  He laughed a little.

“Not as if you was wedding Phoebe, who’s only a miller’s girl?” he asked.  Ishmael laughed too, though a little doubtfully, not sure of the cordiality of Archelaus’s chuckle.

“Of course it’s not like.  Phoebe’s a dear little thing, but Miss Grey is different, naturally.”

In the passage Archelaus ran into Phoebe, emerging with the other girls, and took from her with an air of gallantry the wrap she had upon her arm.

“I’ll put ’ee home,” he told her:  “best have this on; ’tes a bit cool on cliff.”

“Oh, but—­” began Phoebe.  She had no hopes, such as she had cherished, against all reason, upon getting Ishmael’s note that morning, of a moonlit walk home with him, but something in her shrank from the walk undertaken with Archelaus.  He wrapped the shawl about her as she spoke.  Phoebe could no more have resisted a man who had his mind made up than a frog can get away from a viper which has once sighted it, and she let herself be swathed without further protest.  Good-byes were said, with careless affection on the part of Vassie, and kindliness from Judith and a pressure of the hand and a deep look from Blanche.

“Good-night, little girl!  You’re going to be very happy, too, you know,” said Blanche, who knew nothing about it, but felt it was a good thing to say.  Phoebe and Archelaus, both tongue-tied now they were alone, set off through the moonlight and the soft air to the cliff path.

It was a long time now since she had met Archelaus out of doors, as he had several times half-coaxed, half-bullied her into doing.  Now she felt a constraint with him she had not previously, as though there were some portent in the simple act of seeing her home there had never been before.  She had, of course, flirted with him in a very innocent way, if her methods had been a little cruder than Blanche’s would have under the same circumstances.  The repartee had been simple and the caresses nothing more than a slight touch on waist or arm, repulsed by her with more alarm than prudery.  Phoebe was fonder far of Ishmael than of Archelaus; she told herself that she admired Ishmael more—­he was so much the gentleman....  What she did not know was that a rebel thing in her, the thing for which poor facile, soft little Phoebe had been as much created as though she had been a field-mouse, responded to Archelaus because it felt he was so much the male.  Phoebe had been safeguarded all her short life by her notions of gentility and by her fear, the fear, not of consequences, but, less base than that, the fear of actual passion, which is often implanted in very passionate girls as though to guard them till the time comes.