“Yes.” There is a faint inclination of surprise at her truism. “If you died unmarried, at Uncle George’s death the Campion family would be extinct?” The surprise in the next “yes” is emphasized. “But you are very young still?” she asks, as if in appeal from some maintenance of a contrary contention to him. “No one could expect you to marry _yet_?” He looks back at her in dumb astonishment. Save in yesterday’s laughing argument as to which of them had originally wooed the other, the question of their engagement has scarcely ever been referred to by her. “And I am young too!” she goes on, in that puzzlingly pleading voice, as if still answering some invisible objector. “Most sensible people think that a woman should not marry before five and twenty!” “Is this the Rectory?” he asks, in a tone where wonder seems to strive with a half-distrust. “Must the Rectory supply _all_ my ideas?” retorts she, half-laughing, yet still with that new sense of constraint. “Mayn’t I be allowed to have any of my own?” He shakes his curly head--the head which is never shorn quite close enough to suit his father’s taste. “The voice is the voice of Lavinia; but the words are the words of Susan,” he says, drily. “She had an idea--built upon, I do not exactly know what”--reddening faintly at her own disingenuousness, and yet unable to break the lifelong habit of taking Rupert into her confidence--“that your father--that the change in--that poor Bill’s death, in short, might make it desirable that we should----” She stops, jibbing at the matter-of-fact word which yet has always closed the vista of her lookings into the future as a thing of course. Her companion supplies it, “Marry;” and to her ears it seems that an awkwardness like her own has remodulated his familiar voice. There are more crocuses this year than last, pushing their yolk-yellow goblets through the grass; two or three have even invaded the gravel walk. “Is the idea disagreeable to you?” asks the young man, in a key to whose agitated diffidence the girl is a stranger. “Disagreeable! why should it be?” replies she, trying vainly to shake off the oppressive absurdity of that new shyness which has laid hands on them both. “Have not I been looking it in the face all my life? Didn’t we agree yesterday that it was I who originally proposed to you?” “You have had a good many accesses of hatred to me since then,” he says hesitatingly. “Yes, I have,” replies she, hotly, both cheeks hanging out flame signals; “but you always know what produces them, and it lies with you to prevent them ever recurring. I hated you when I found that that wretched little pro-Boer poem in the _Shipton Herald_ was by you; and I detested you when you said that if by any extraordinary accident you were killed on a battle-field, your wounds would certainly all be in the back!” Her loss of self-control seems to give him back his.