"You said yourself I wanted violets to sweeten me and hammers to soften me--you think I'm so bitter and so hard."

"You know what I think of you. And you know," he said, "that I love you."

"You mustn't," she whispered. "It's no good."

He seemed not to have heard her. "And some day," he said, "I shall marry you. I'd marry you to-morrow if I'd enough money to buy a hat with."

"It's no use loving me. You can't marry me."

"I know I can't. But it makes no difference."

"No difference?"

"Not to me."

"If you could," she said, "I wouldn't let you. It would only be one misery more."

"How do you know what it would be?"

"I won't even let you love me. That's misery too."

"You don't know what it is."

"I do know, and I don't want any more of it. I've been hurt with it."

With a low cry of pity and pain he took her in his arms and held her to him.

She writhed and struggled in his clasp. "Don't," she cried, "don't touch me. Let me alone. I can't bear it."

He turned her face to his to find the truth in her eyes. "And yet," he said, "you love me."

"No, no. It's no use," she reiterated; "it's no use. I won't have it. I won't let you love me."

"You can't stop me."

"I can stop you torturing me!"

She was freed from his arms now. She sat up. Her small face was sullen and defiant in its expression of indomitable will.

"Of course," he said, "you can stop me touching you. But it makes no difference. I shall go on caring for you. It's no use struggling and crying against that."

"I shall go on struggling."

"Go on as long as you like. It doesn't matter. I can wait."

She rose. "Come," she said. "It's time to be going back."

He obeyed her. When they reached the rise on the station road they turned and waited for the others to come up with them. They looked back.

Their hill was on their left, to their right was the great plain, grey with mist. They stood silent, oppressed by their sense of a sad and sudden beauty. Then with the others they swung down the road to the station.

Before the end of the day Brodrick heard that his offer was accepted.

XXVIII

It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere.

"Why didn't you go with her?" she said.

"I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself."

"As if I wasn't always by myself."

Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with its involuntary surrender.

He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the pa.s.sers by. But the pace he set was terrific.

"You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets."

"Not odder than you, do I? _You_ ought to be swinging up a mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see you."

"Do you remember?"

"I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me, hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper ledge down on to the track. Your hair--you had lots of hair, all tawny--some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the mountain. I had found my wild cat."

"I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer."

"Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the terror of the mountains in them."

"And yours--yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."

"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."

"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press on you and hurt you?"

They were pa.s.sing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.

"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there--you and I could go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would simply disappear."

They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.

"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.

"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."

"Isn't it--horrible?"