Not a word more was spoken as they gathered the currants.  Adam’s heart was too full to speak, and he thought Hetty knew all that was in it.  She was not indifferent to his presence after all; she had blushed when she saw him, and then there was that touch of sadness about her which must surely mean love, since it was the opposite of her usual manner, which had often impressed him as indifference.  And he could glance at her continually as she bent over the fruit, while the level evening sunbeams stole through the thick apple-tree boughs, and rested on her round cheek and neck as if they too were in love with her.  It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after-life, the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by a slight something—­a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or an eyelid—­that she is at least beginning to love him in return.  The sign is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or eye—­he could describe it to no one—­it is a mere feather-touch, yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy yearning into a delicious unconsciousness of everything but the present moment.  So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory:  we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother’s bosom or rode on our father’s back in childhood.  Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.  But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far-off hour of happiness.  It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy and adds the last keenness to the agony of despair.

Hetty bending over the red bunches, the level rays piercing the screen of apple-tree boughs, the length of bushy garden beyond, his own emotion as he looked at her and believed that she was thinking of him, and that there was no need for them to talk—­Adam remembered it all to the last moment of his life.

And Hetty?  You know quite well that Adam was mistaken about her.  Like many other men, he thought the signs of love for another were signs of love towards himself.  When Adam was approaching unseen by her, she was absorbed as usual in thinking and wondering about Arthur’s possible return.  The sound of any man’s footstep would have affected her just in the same way—­she would have felt it might be Arthur before she had time to see, and the blood that forsook her cheek in the agitation of that momentary feeling would have rushed back again at the sight of any one else just as much as at the sight of Adam.  He was not wrong in thinking that a change had come over Hetty:  the anxieties and