‘Distrust you?’ She could not think that she understood him.

‘Do you fear to come to London with me?’

‘Wilfrid?’

Her bosom heaved with passionate resentment of his thought.

‘Is that how you understand my motives?’ she asked, with tremulous, subdued earnestness, fixing upon him a gaze which he could not meet.

‘Yes,’ he answered, below his breath, ’in a moment when love of you has made me mad.’

He turned away, leaning with one hand upon the trunk.  In the silence which followed he appeared to be examining the shapeless ruins, which, from this point of view, stood out boldly against the sky.

‘When was this castle destroyed?’ he asked presently, in a steady voice.

He received no answer, and turned his eyes to her again.  Emily’s face was strung into a hard intensity.  He laid his hand once more upon hers, and spoke with self-control.

’You do not know the strength of a man’s love.  In that moment it touched the borders of hate.  I know that your mind is incapable of such a suspicion; try to think what it meant to be possessed for an instant by such frenzy.’

‘You felt able to hate me?’ she said, with a shake in her voice which might have become either a laugh or a sob.  ’Then there are things in love that I shall never know.’

’Because your soul is pure as that of the angels they dream of.  I could not love yen so terribly if you were not that perfection of womanhood to which all being is drawn.  Send me to do your bidding; I will have no will but yours.’

How the light of rapture flashed athwart her face!  It was hard for her to find words that would not seem too positive, too insubmissive.

’Only till you have lived with your father in the thought of this thing,’ she murmured, ’and until I have taught myself to bear my happiness.  Are we not one already, dear?  Why should you needlessly make your life poorer by the loss—­if only for a time—­of all the old kindnesses?  I think, I know, that in a few days your mind will be the same as my own.  Do you remember how long it is since we first spoke to each other?’

‘Not so many days as make a week,’ he answered, smiling.

’Is not that hard to believe?  And hard to realise that the new world is still within the old?’

’Sweet, still eyes—­give to me seine of your wisdom!  But you have a terrible way of teaching calmness.’

‘You will go straight to the Continent, Wilfrid?’

‘Only with one promise.’

‘And that?’

‘You will bow to my judgment when I return.’

‘My fate shall be in your hands.’

They talked still, while the shadows of the ruins moved ever towards them.  All the afternoon no footsteps had come near; it was the sight of two strangers which at length bade Emily think of the time.  It was after six o’clock.

’Wilfrid, I must go.  My absence will seem so strange what fables I shall have to invent on the way home.  Do you know of any train that you can leave by?’