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 which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and less self-conscious than usual, and Mary, indeed, was overcome by a sort of light-headedness which made it seem to her that it mattered very little what happened next. It mattered so little, indeed, that she felt herself on the point of saying to Ralph:

“I love you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me; think what you like of me—I don’t care a straw.” At the moment, however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rustlike bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, “I love you,” or whether she said, “I love the beech-trees,” or only “I love—I love.”

“Do you know, Mary,” Ralph suddenly interrupted her, “I've made up my mind.”

Her indifference must have been superficial, for it disappeared at once. Indeed, she lost sight of the trees, and saw her own hand upon the topmost bar of the gate with extreme distinctness, while he went on:

“I’ve made up my mind to chuck my work and live down here. I want you to tell me about that cottage you spoke of. However, I suppose there’ll be no difficulty about getting a cottage, will there?” He spoke with an assumption of carelessness as if expecting her to dissuade him.

She still waited, as if for him to continue; she was convinced that in some roundabout way he approached the subject of their marriage.