“Of course I trust you; but a promise is a promise.  You oughtn’t to ask me, Nedda.”

“No; but I would never have promised to keep anything from you.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Oh! yes, I do.  Love doesn’t mean the same to you that it does to me.”

“How do you know what it means to me?”

“I couldn’t have a secret from you.”

“Then you don’t count honour.”

“Honour only binds oneself!”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“I include you—­you don’t include me in yourself, that’s all.”

“I think you’re very unjust.  I was obliged to promise; it doesn’t only concern myself.”

Then silent, motionless, a yard apart, they looked fiercely at each other, their hearts stiff and sore, and in their brains no glimmer of perception of anything but tragedy.  What more tragic than to have come out of an elysium of warm arms round each other, to this sudden hostility!  And the owl went on hooting, and the larches smelled sweet!  And all around was the same soft dusk wherein the flowers in her hair and round her waist gleamed white!  But for Nedda the world had suddenly collapsed.  Tears rushed into her eyes; she shook her head and turned away, hiding them passionately. . . .  A full minute passed, each straining to make no sound and catch the faintest sound from the other, till in her breathing there was a little clutch.  His fingers came stealing round, touched her cheeks, and were wetted.  His arms suddenly squeezed all breath out of her; his lips fastened on hers.  She answered those lips with her own desperately, bending her head back, shutting her wet eyes.  And the owl hooted, and the white flowers fell into the dusk off her hair and waist.

After that, they walked once more enlaced, avoiding with what perfect care any allusion to the sudden tragedy, giving themselves up to the bewildering ecstasy that had started throbbing in their blood with that kiss, longing only not to spoil it.  And through the sheltering larch wood their figures moved from edge to edge, like two little souls in paradise, unwilling to come forth.

After that evening love had a poignancy it had not quite had before; at once deeper, sweeter, tinged for both of them with the rich darkness of passion, and with discovery that love does not mean a perfect merger of one within another.  For both felt themselves in the right over that little quarrel.  The boy that he could not, must not, resign what was not his to resign; feeling dimly, without being quite able to shape the thought even to himself, that a man has a life of action into which a woman cannot always enter, with which she cannot always be identified.  The girl feeling that she did not want any life into which he did not enter, so that it was hard that he should want to exclude her from anything.  For all that, she did not try again to move him to let her into the secret of his plans of revolt and revenge, and disdained completely to find them out from Sheila or her aunt.