“No,” she cried abruptly, starting into motion.

She laid a hand on my arm.  A wonderful new friendliness came into her voice.  “It’s impossible, Willie.  Everything is different now—­everything.  We made a mistake.  We two young sillies made a mistake and everything is different for ever.  Yes, yes.”

She turned about.

“Nettie!” cried I, and still protesting, pursued her along the narrow alley between the staging toward the hot-house door.  I pursued her like an accusation, and she went before me like one who is guilty and ashamed.  So I recall it now.

She would not let me talk to her again.

Yet I could see that my talk to her had altogether abolished the clear-cut distance of our meeting in the park.  Ever and again I found her hazel eyes upon me.  They expressed something novel—­a surprise, as though she realized an unwonted relationship, and a sympathetic pity.  And still—­something defensive.

When we got back to the cottage, I fell talking rather more freely with her father about the nationalization of railways, and my spirits and temper had so far mended at the realization that I could still produce an effect upon Nettie, that I was even playful with Puss.  Mrs. Stuart judged from that that things were better with me than they were, and began to beam mightily.

But Nettie remained thoughtful and said very little.  She was lost in perplexities I could not fathom, and presently she slipped away from us and went upstairs.

Section 6

I was, of course, too footsore to walk back to Clayton, but I had a shilling and a penny in my pocket for the train between Checkshill and Two-Mile Stone, and that much of the distance I proposed to do in the train.  And when I got ready to go, Nettie amazed me by waking up to the most remarkable solicitude for me.  I must, she said, go by the road.  It was altogether too dark for the short way to the lodge gates.

I pointed out that it was moonlight.  “With the comet thrown in,” said old Stuart.

“No,” she insisted, “you must go by the road.”

I still disputed.

She was standing near me.  “To please me,” she urged, in a quick undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me.  Even in the moment I asked myself why should this please her?

I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, “The hollies by the shrubbery are as dark as pitch.  And there’s the deer-hounds.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark,” said I.  “Nor of the deer-hounds, either.”

“But those dogs!  Supposing one was loose!”

That was a girl’s argument, a girl who still had to understand that fear is an overt argument only for her own sex.  I thought too of those grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus they could make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along the edge of the Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to please her.  Like most imaginative natures I was acutely capable of dreads and retreats, and constantly occupied with their suppression and concealment, and to refuse the short cut when it might appear that I did it on account of half a dozen almost certainly chained dogs was impossible.