It was toward the end of a coppery afternoon, the hazy air aflame with the sun taking on the colour of the burnished trees. To Moira, it had been an unreal day too, for her thoughts were running upon revolutionary impulses, plans that would have seemed impossibly romantic a few months before. Was it only because of this suddenly important comradeship with Miles Harlindew that she had quite painfully realized a sense of loss? She needed much more than life was giving her, much more than her mere comfort and independence, even than her painting. Their half year together had been full of a strangely wide sympathy. But it had also been casual, without purpose and without end. The first tang and odour of Autumn cold always brought a stirring of unreasonable energy in her, a sense of dissatisfaction ... a prophecy of change. But now it was like nothing she had ever known before, a stifling in the midst of limitless air to breathe. “Seasons must be responsible for a great deal in life,” she said. “I wonder if anything would get itself done at all, if it were not for them, for the urging they give us to act.” “I have thought that too,” replied Miles. “You could almost live, simply by letting the time of the year do what it will with you. I shouldn’t be shocked if some one told me I had lived that way myself, most of my life.” He drew out a pipe, filled and lighted it, and the fragrant smell was pleasing to her nostrils. She liked his agreeable, easy ways. He needed little to be happy, his thoughts, his books, tobacco, clothes that seemed to have grown older with him. Since that diffused night he had spent in her rooms in June, his life had run along in a quiet groove, free from excitement or discontent--a period during which, as he told her, weeks seemed so much longer because they were filled with so many more and varied impressions, and these impressions were caught and relished and fixed as they passed. Excitement and sprees were monotonous, not varied, and one lost almost all of one’s impressions.... She had shared this slow magic with him, and she understood what he meant. Suddenly she found herself asking him to marry her. “But, child,” he said, with amusement in his face and voice, “you couldn’t do that.” “I’m not a child,” she replied, with unmistakable seriousness, “and I could. I love you.” He stopped walking and faced her, holding his pipe halfway to his mouth and looking at her in blank amazement. “My dear Mary!” he exclaimed. “My name isn’t Mary,” she broke in. “It’s Moira. Do you like it?” “Moira? Why haven’t you told me that?” “There’s even more to tell, Miles.” “But what do you mean?” “I suppose you won’t answer my question, until you hear the rest?”