"Yes, after all," she went on, still talking to the air, "it's better and braver to try to do something in the world, rather than throw myself upon Robin, and be cowardly enough to take him for a husband when I don't love him. Just for comfort and shelter and Briar Farm! It would be shameful. And I could not marry a man unless I loved him quite desperately!--I could not! I'm not sure that I like the idea of marriage at all,--it fastens a man and woman together for life, and the time might come when they would grow tired of each other. How cruel and wicked it would be to force them to endure each other's company when they perhaps wished the width of the world between them! No--I don't think I should care to be married--certainly not to Robin." She put her manuscript by, and shut and locked the drawer containing it. Then she went to the open lattice window and looked out--and thought of the previous night, when Robin had swung himself up on the sill to talk to her, and they had been all unaware that Ned Landon was listening down below. A flush of anger heated her cheeks as she recalled this and all that Robin had told her of the unprepared attack Landon had made upon him and the ensuing fight between them. But now? Was it not very strange that Landon should apparently be in such high favour with Hugo Jocelyn that he had actually been allowed to stay in the market-town and enjoy a holiday, which for him only meant a bout of drunkenness? She could not understand it, and her perplexity increased the more she thought of it. Leaning far out over the window-sill, she gazed long and lovingly across the quiet stretches of meadowland, shining white in the showered splendour of the moon--the tall trees--the infinite and harmonious peace of the whole scene,--then, shutting the lattice, she pulled the curtains across it, and taking her lit candle, went to her secluded inner sleeping-chamber, where, in the small, quaintly carved four-poster bed, furnished with ancient tapestry and lavendered linen, and covered up under a quilt embroidered three centuries back by the useful fingers of the wife of Sieur Amadis de Jocelin, she soon fell into a sound and dreamless slumber.