As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably hawkish in their male glitter; but her coolness was not disturbed; and without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the silly division and war of the sexes:—­which two might surely enter on an engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl and falcon interlude.  Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she was proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages, while untying her bonnet-strings:—­’If I had begun my life in a cottage!’—­when really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and whirled her to mid-sea, out of every sensibility but the swimming one of her loss of self in the man.

‘You would not have been here!’ was all he said.  She was up at his heart, fast-locked, undergoing a change greater than the sea works; her thoughts one blush, her brain a fire-fount.  This was not like being seated on a throne.

‘There,’ said he, loosening his hug, ’now you belong to me!  I know you from head to foot.  After that, my darling, I could leave you for years, and call you wife, and be sure of you.  I could swear it for you—­my life on it!  That ’s what I think of you.  Don’t wonder that I took my chance —­the first:—­I have waited!’

Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with man’s kiss on her mouth:  the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger, acting on rights she had given him.  And who was she to dream of denying them?  Not an idea in her head!  Bound verily to be thankful for such love, on hearing that it dated from the night in Ireland . . . .  ’So in love with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow—­ whatever you wished; anything you chose.  It’s reckoned a fool’s part.  No, it’s love:  the love of a woman—­the one woman!  I was like the hand of a clock to the springs.  I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him.’

‘Ignorantly, admit,’ said she, and could have bitten her tongue for the empty words that provoked:  ‘Would you have flung him nothing?’ and caused a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections.  ’I hear you have again been defending me.  I told you, I think, I wished I had begun my girl’s life in a cottage.  All that I have had to endure! . . or so it seems to me:  it may be my way of excusing myself:—­I know my cunning in that peculiar art.  I would take my chance of mixing among the highest and the brightest.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Culpably.’

‘It brings you to me.’

‘Through a muddy channel.’

‘Your husband has full faith in you, my own.’

’The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on the hill.  I wish he had taken me from a cottage.’