Yet, over those sunshiny days there hung a shadow, as of something kept back, not shared between them; a kind of waiting menace.  Nedda learned of Kirsteen and Sheila all the useful things she could; the evenings she passed with Derek, those long evenings of late May and early June, this year so warm and golden.  They walked generally in the direction of the hills.  A favorite spot was a wood of larches whose green shoots had not yet quite ceased to smell of lemons.  Tall, slender things those trees, whose stems and dried lower branch-growth were gray, almost sooty, up to the feathery green of the tops, that swayed and creaked faintly in a wind, with a soughing of their branches like the sound of the sea.  From the shelter of those Highland trees, rather strange in such a countryside, they two could peer forth at the last sunlight gold-powdering the fringed branches, at the sunset flush dyeing the sky above the Beacon; watch light slowly folding gray wings above the hay-fields and the elms; mark the squirrels scurry along, and the pigeons’ evening flight.  A stream ran there at the edge, and beech-trees grew beside it.  In the tawny-dappled sand bed of that clear water, and the gray-green dappled trunks of those beeches with their great, sinuous, long-muscled roots, was that something which man can never tame or garden out of the land:  the strength of unconquerable fertility—­the remote deep life in Nature’s heart.  Men and women had their spans of existence; those trees seemed as if there forever!  From generation to generation lovers might come and, looking on this strength and beauty, feel in their veins the sap of the world.  Here the laborer and his master, hearing the wind in the branches and the water murmuring down, might for a brief minute grasp the land’s unchangeable wild majesty.  And on the far side of that little stream was a field of moon-colored flowers that had for Nedda a strange fascination.  Once the boy jumped across and brought her back a handkerchief full.  They were of two kinds:  close to the water’s edge the marsh orchis, and farther back, a small marguerite.  Out of this they made a crown of the alternate flowers, and a girdle for her waist.  That was an evening of rare beauty, and warm enough already for an early chafer to go blooming in the dusk.  An evening when they wandered with their arms round each other a long time, silent, stopping to listen to an owl; stopping to point out each star coming so shyly up in the gray-violet of the sky.  And that was the evening when they had a strange little quarrel, sudden as a white squall on a blue sea, or the tiff of two birds shooting up in a swift spiral of attack and then—­all over.  Would he come to-morrow to see her milking?  He could not.  Why?  He could not; he would be out.  Ah! he never told her where he went; he never let her come with him among the laborers like Sheila.

“I can’t; I’m pledged not.”

“Then you don’t trust me!”