They cover almost a mile in total silence; two miserable blots on the sweet pageant of evening. They meet a herd of cows returning to their juicy pasture after milking, straggling over the road, snatching mouthfuls out of the lush hedge-rows; a few children loiteringly picking flowers, and wastefully tossing them away, with the prodigal cruelty of Mother Nature herself; a farm servant tittering over a gate with a ploughboy. Married birds sing the joys of the nest and the family, and one blackbird seems to keep pace with them as they go, merely to mock them with his liquid telling that, as his Creator had done, he finds his world of the hedge and the pasture and the new green tree very good. Both Rupert and Lavinia are dully sensible of the jar with the surrounding happy suavities that Lavinia’s resumption of the conversation brings with it. “Can you suggest anything better? You must remember how short a time we have.” “Yes, I remember.” “If you are quite resolved not to marry me----” “I am quite resolved.” “You have never told me why?” She says it faintly, glancing at him with that new and most uncharacteristic shiftiness which she feels that his all-noticing eye must already have observed. “If you wish I will tell you.” “No!” she answers with almost inaudible haste. “It is enough for me that you no longer wish it! I do not doubt that you have good reasons; but”--growing more distinct in a feverish sophistry of desire to put herself in the right--“let it be clearly understood that it is not _I_ who go back from the bargain! I _was_--I _am_ willing to fulfil it.” “Thank you.” The courteous irony of his gratitude stings her back into muteness; and again they walk on, unconscious of time or distance. “I am willing to tell you what I have done, what happened, how it came about!” “But I am not willing to hear.” Her offer has been incalculably difficult to make, and its refusal ought to bring her some relief; yet the mournful magnanimity of that refusal crushes her. She struggles weakly to crawl from under its weight. “Though you will not listen to my explanation, you will take my word that I have not done anything absolutely disgraceful!” He gives a sort of shiver, the kind of gesture of disgust--only a million times intensified--that she has formerly seen him make at any instance of glaring bad taste in art, literature, or manners. “Yes, I take your word! Only”--with that shudder in his voice--“don’t say that you are sorry, and that you won’t do it again!”