She slipped lightly out of the saddle, and stood beside him, bridle in hand, the petted horse rubbing his velvet nose against her shoulder. ‘William is half a mile behind,’ she said. ‘He’s on one of papa’s old hunters. Don’t you hear him?’ A distant noise, like the puffing of a steam-engine, announced the groom’s approach. ‘Cyril,’ cried Beatrix, ‘are you as glad to see me as I am to see you?’ ‘It is more than gladness that I feel, dear,’ he answered, clasping her hands and looking earnestly at the expressive face, which had faded to a sickly pallor after the flush of joy, ‘but, my dearest, how ill you are looking, how changed----’ ‘Oh, I have been miserable,’ she said, impetuously, ‘simply miserable. I miss you every day in the week, every hour in the day. I did not see you very often, did I? And yet, now that I am forbidden to go to the Vicarage, it seems as if my life had been spent in your society. Oh, you have work to do, you have noble ideas to fill your mind! How can you tell the blankness of a woman’s life, parted from all she loves?’ ‘My darling, it is not for life; it is only for a little while.’ ‘A little while!’ she cried, impatiently. ‘A day is an age when one is miserable. I wake every morning, oh so early! and see the dreary gray light, and say to myself, “What does it matter? Night and day are alike to me. I shall not see him.” Cyril, why did you write me that cruel letter?’ The groom had ridden up by this time on his roaring hunter, and was standing at a respectful distance, wondering what his young mistress could have to say to the curate, and why she had dismounted in order to say it. ‘My own love, how could I write otherwise? I promised your father that for two years I would respect his desires, that I would counsel you to no act of disobedience till you were old enough to take the full measure of your acts--till time had changed impulse into conviction. How could I have written otherwise than as I did?’ ‘You could have said, “Defy your father as I do, laugh to scorn the loss of fortune, as I do. Be my wife. We shall be very poor, perhaps, for the first few years. But Heaven will take care of us as the ravens cared for Elijah.” That is how you ought to have written to me.’ He was sorely tempted by her--tempted to take her to his heart that moment, to rain kisses on the sweet pale face that he had never kissed--to mount her on her lively young bay horse, and steal the groom’s hunter for himself, and ride off to the Scottish border with her, and be married by the unlearned priest of Gretna, who was still plying his profitable trade. Never was man more tempted. But he had given his promise, and meant to keep it. ‘Two years hence, my dearest, please God, I will have a home for you that shall not mean absolute poverty. I cannot break my word, love. We must wait till you are one-and-twenty. It is not a long time.’