in things in spite of everything, until they’re like the flowers, so perfect that we laugh and sing at their beauty, grow in me, too; make me beautiful and brave; then I shall be fit for him, alive or dead; and that’s all I want.  Every evening I shall stand in spirit with him at the end of that orchard in the darkness, under the trees above the white flowers and the sleepy cows, and perhaps I shall feel him kiss me again. . . .  I’m glad I saw that old man Gaunt; it makes what they feel more real to me.  He showed me that poor laborer Tryst, too, the one who mustn’t marry his wife’s sister, or have her staying in the house without marrying her.  Why should people interfere with others like that?  It does make your blood boil!  Derek and Sheila have been brought up to be in sympathy with the poor and oppressed.  If they had lived in London they would have been even more furious, I expect.  And it’s no use my saying to myself ‘I don’t know the laborer, I don’t know his hardships,’ because he is really just the country half of what I do know and see, here in London, when I don’t hide my eyes.  One talk showed me how desperately they feel; at night, in Sheila’s room, when we had gone up, just we four.  Alan began it; they didn’t want to, I could see; but he was criticising what some of those Bigwigs had said—­the ’Varsity makes boys awfully conceited.  It was such a lovely night; we were all in the big, long window.  A little bat kept flying past; and behind the copper-beech the moon was shining on the lake.  Derek sat in the windowsill, and when he moved he touched me.  To be touched by him gives me a warm shiver all through.  I could hear him gritting his teeth at what Alan said—­frightfully sententious, just like a newspaper:  ’We can’t go into land reform from feeling, we must go into it from reason.’  Then Derek broke out:  ’Walk through this country as we’ve walked; see the pigsties the people live in; see the water they drink; see the tiny patches of ground they have; see the way their roofs let in the rain; see their peeky children; see their patience and their hopelessness; see them working day in and day out, and coming on the parish at the end!  See all that, and then talk about reason!  Reason!  It’s the coward’s excuse, and the rich man’s excuse, for doing nothing.  It’s the excuse of the man who takes jolly good care not to see for fear that he may come to feel!  Reason never does anything, it’s too reasonable.  The thing is to act; then perhaps reason will be jolted into doing something.’  But Sheila touched his arm, and he stopped very suddenly.  She doesn’t trust us.  I shall always be being pushed away from him by her.  He’s just twenty, and I shall be eighteen in a week; couldn’t we marry now at once?  Then, whatever happened, I couldn’t be cut off from him.  If I could tell Dad, and ask him to help me!  But I can’t—­it seems desecration to talk about it, even to Dad.  All the way up in the train to-day, coming back home, I was struggling not to show anything; though it’s hateful to keep things from Dad.  Love alters everything; it melts up the whole world and makes it afresh.  Love is the sun of our spirits, and it’s the wind.  Ah, and the rain, too!  But I won’t think of that! . . .  I wonder if he’s told Aunt Kirsteen! . . .”