Joel let her go with the customary embrace, but she felt no warmth in it. She was hurt at his indifference, and paused, when she reached the garden, to compose her features before meeting the eyes of her great-grandmother, who believed that she was in the dairy turning cheeses. She thought of his handsome face and form, and then her resentment sank. She dared not lose him; she could not contemplate a quarrel; if she entered the house now and shut the door upon her present feelings, she would be also shutting up sorrow in her heart. She wondered whether she were to blame: whether she had failed in sympathy and understanding. Perhaps she had been cold, and he was hurt as well as she. Lucy plucked a half-opened rose and returned, meaning to run after him if he had gone home. But he was still standing in their meeting place, hidden by the trees. "I couldn't leave you so, Joel," she murmured, twining her fingers in his. "I shouldn't sleep to-night if I thought you had any cause to be angry with me. Have I done aught amiss?" He put his arms round her, roused to a show of affection by her voice. He cared for her deeply, but there were times when he found her love exacting, when he could not reach the heights whereon she stood. The fault lay in himself. It lay in his heart, which was so weighted by anxiety, that he often had not the energy to climb up beside her. "Yes," he said with a return to his usual manner, "you've done one thing amiss--you've grown so deucedly pretty that you've left me neither a calm heart nor a clear head to manage my worldly affairs." Lucy laughed, and pinned the rose-bud into his coat, reassured at his words. She was happy again, happy as a flower drinking in the dew. The beck sang of tranquillity; the trees were kindly souls, making a bower for him and her; the darkness was a soft green curtain shutting out the world and prying eyes. They lingered a while without speaking--she thinking only of him, he distracted by his own thoughts. Then she went away. He saw her go with a feeling of relief. Now he would have quietness in which to measure his intentions and understand himself. When the glimmer of her cotton frock had vanished up the path, he sat down to contemplation. He had not yet made up his mind what to do: he had deferred his decision--so he thought--until this moment, because he wished to face it squarely. He would not have his mind entrapped by some subtle move of the hand of chance. But he was only deceiving himself. In the silence of the copse, with the singing water to take the intensity off a silence which would have distracted him, he found that he had no decision to make. The contest had been fought in his innermost being by manoeuvres which he was barely aware of. It had gone on, as it were, under cover of a veil that he had drawn between his consciousness and his nature.