Page:Love and Mr. Lewisham – Wells (1899).djvu/66

54 jug upon the table, and Ethel admired them, and when they set out again the little old lady insisted on her taking a bunch with her.

It was after they left Immering that this ramble, properly speaking, became scandalous. The sun was already a golden ball above the blue hills in the west—it turned our two young people into little figures of flame—and yet, instead of going homeward, they took the Wentworth road that plunges into the Forshaw woods. Behind them the moon, almost full, hung in the blue sky above the tree-tops, ghostly and indistinct, and slowly gathered to itself such light as the setting sun left for it in the sky.

Going out of Immering they began to talk of the future. And for the very young lover there is no future but the immediate future.

"You must write to me," he said, and she told him she wrote such silly letters. "But I shall have reams to write to you," he told her.

"How are you to write to me?" she asked, and they discussed a new obstacle between them. It would never do to write home—never. She was sure of that with an absolute assurance. "My mother—" she said and stopped.

That prohibition cut him, for at that time he had the makings of a voluminous letter-writer. Yet it was only what one might expect. The whole