“I do.  Good-night, lil’ thing!” And he withdrew the foot and was off through the darkness under the elms.  Phoebe was left with her awakened heart-beats.

CHAPTER XIV

A LETTER

Harvest had all been gathered in at Cloom, the threshing was over, the grain lay in heaps, grey-green and golden, in the barn, or had been sold and taken away, and the first tang of early autumn was in the air.  The peewits had come down and were mewing in the dappled skies, and on the telegraph wires the high-shouldered swallows sat in rows preparing for flight; in the hedgerows the dead hemlocks, brittle as fine shells, were ready to scatter their pale seeds at a touch, and the blackberries, on which as the West Country saying has it, the devil had already laid his finger, were filmed with mildew.  It was autumn, but rich, warm autumn, dropping her leaf and seed into the teeming earth, whose grain was garnered, but whose womb was already fertile with the future.

Blanche was still at Mrs. Penticost’s, and the engagement, though it had not actually been announced, had leaked out, and Blanche was not at all satisfied with the results that had followed upon that dissemination of knowledge.  Annie’s hostility she could bear, for she knew that, once married to Ishmael, his mother would be placed somewhere too far removed for the nuisance of her to be more than occasional; it was not that which was blowing with so chill a breath over her spirit.  It was, as she phrased it to herself, the whole thing....

Ever since that night upon the boulders above the wood her sureness, both of the depth of her own feeling for Ishmael and for the country method of life that went with him, had been declining, as from some crest set in too rarefied an air for her to breathe with comfort.  Poise had been slipping from her, and she was genuinely distressed.  In the first stage of her declension she was chiefly occupied with a frantic snatching at her passion—­a sustained effort to pull it back and keep it with her; in the second she was occupied in wondering how best to get gracefully out of the entanglement, which was how she grew to envisage it.  At first this seemed to be hardly possible; she saw pathetic pictures of herself going on with it and sacrificing herself, unaware how the pleasure of the moment was leading her on, how charming she found Ishmael’s considerate and tender love-making that came to her jaded nerves with the refreshing quality of a draught of pure water to a man who has lived too long on champagne.  The actual present continued to be pleasurable long after she had determined that it could never crystallise into anything more definite, and so she went on from day to day, enjoying herself, yet vaguely hoping something would happen which would enable her to retire from the engagement without loss of self-respect or that of Ishmael.