“There’s no one to give you an excuse now, and you must come and walk round with me,” said a voice, close to her ear.

“Oh, Mr. Morton, how you have startled me!”

“Is there anything the matter, Mary?” said he, looking up into her face.

“Only you have startled me so.”

“Has that brought tears into your eyes.”

“Well,—­I suppose so,” she said trying to smile.  “You were so very quiet and I thought you were in London.”

“So I was this morning, and now I am here.  But something else has made you unhappy.”

“No; nothing.”

“I wish we could be friends, Mary.  I wish I could know your secret.  You have a secret.”

“No,” she said boldly.

“Is there nothing?”

“What should there be, Mr. Morton!”

“Tell me why you were crying.”

“I was not crying.  Just a tear is not crying.  Sometimes one does get melancholy.  One can’t cry when there is any one to look, and so one does it alone.  I’d have been laughing if I knew that you were coming.”

“Come round by the kennels.  You can get over the wall;—­can’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

“And we’ll go down the old orchard, and get out by the corner of the park fence.”  Then he walked and she followed him, hardly keeping close by his side, and thinking as she went how foolish she had been not to have avoided the perils and fresh troubles of such a walk.  When he was helping her over the wall he held her hands for a moment and she was aware of unusual pressure.  It was the pressure of love,—­or of that pretence of love which young men, and perhaps old men, sometimes permit themselves to affect.  In an ordinary way Mary would have thought as little of it as another girl.  She might feel dislike to the man, but the affair would be too light for resentment.  With this man it was different.  He certainly was not justified in making the slightest expression of factitious affection.  He at any rate should have felt himself bound to abstain from any touch of peculiar tenderness.  She would not say a word.  She would not even look at him with angry eyes.  But she twitched both her hands away from him as she sprang to the ground.  Then there was a passage across the orchard,—­not more than a hundred yards, and after that a stile.  At the stile she insisted on using her own hand for the custody of her dress.  She would not even touch his outstretched arm.  “You are very independent,” he said.

“I have to be so.”

“I cannot make you out, Mary.  I wonder whether there is still anything rankling in your bosom against me.”

“Oh dear no.  What should rankle with me?”

“What indeed;—­unless you resent my—­regard.”

“I am not so rich in friends as to do that, Mr. Morton.”

“I don’t suppose there can be many people who have the same sort of feeling for you that I have.”

“There are not many who have known me so long, certainly.”