must not refuse us.”  Burton rose to his feet determinedly.  “Not only do I refuse,” he said, “but it is not a matter which I am inclined to discuss any longer.  I am sorry if you are disappointed, but my story was really told to Mr. Cowper here in confidence.”  He left them both sitting there.  He found Edith in a corner of the long drawing-room.  She was pretending to read.

“Whatever is the matter?” she asked.  “I did not expect you so soon.  I thought that Mr. Bomford and father wanted to talk to you.”  “So they did,” he replied.  “They made me a foolish offer.  It was Mr. Bomford’s idea, I am sure, not your father’s.  I am tired, Edith.  Come and walk with me.”—­She glanced out of the window.

“I think,” she said demurely, “that I am expected to go for a ride with Mr. Bomford.”

“Then please disappoint him,” he pleaded.  “I do not like your friend Mr. Bomford.  He is an egotistical and ignorant person.  We will go across the moors, we will climb our little hill.  Perhaps we might even wait there until the sunset.”

“I am quite sure,” she said decidedly, “that Mr. Bomford would not like that.”

“What does it matter?” he answered.  “A man like Mr. Bomford has no right to have any authority over you at all.  You are of a different clay.  I am sure that you will never marry him.  If you will not walk with me, I shall work, and I am not in the humor for work.  I shall probably spoil one of my best chapters.”

She rose to her feet.

“In the interests of your novel!” she murmured.  “Come!  Only we had better go out by the back door.”

Like children they stole out of the house.  They climbed the rolling moorland till they reached the hill on the further side of the valley.  She sat down, breathless, with her back against the trunk of a small Scotch fir.  Burton threw himself on to the ground by her side.

“We think too much always of consequences,” he said “After this evening, what does anything matter?  The gorse is a flaming yellow; do you see how it looks like a field of gold there in the distance?  Only the haze separates it from the blue sky.  Look down where I am pointing, Edith.  It was there by the side of the road that I first looked into the garden and saw you.”

“It was not you who looked,” she objected, shaking her head.  “It was the other man.”

“What part is it that survives?” he asked, a little bitterly.  “Why should the new man be cursed with memory?  Don’t you think that even then there must have been two of me, one struggling against the other—­one seeking for the big things, one laying hold of the lower?  We are all like that, Edith!  Even now I sometimes feel the tug, although it leads in other directions.”

“To Garden Green?” she murmured.

“Never that,” he answered fiercely, “and you know it.  There are lower heights, though, in the most cultured of lives.  There are moments of madness, moments that carry one off one’s feet, which come alike to the slave and his master.  Dear Edith, up here one can talk.  It is such a beautiful world.  One can open one’s eyes, one can breathe, one can look around him.  It is the joy of simple things, the real true joy of life which beats in our veins.  Do you think that we were made for unhappiness in such a world, Edith?”