Magnet was naturally an attentive lover; he was full of small encumbering services, and it made him none the less assiduous to perceive that Marjorie seemed to find no sort of pleasure in all the little things he did. He seemed to think that if picking the very best rose he could find for her did not cause a very perceptible brightening in her, then it was all the more necessary quietly to force her racquet from her hand and carry it for her, or help her ineffectually to cross a foot-wide ditch, or offer to read her in a rich, abundant, well modulated voice, some choice passage from "The Forest Lovers" of Mr. Maurice Hewlett. And behind these devotions there was a streak of jealousy. He knew as if by instinct that it was not wise to leave these two handsome young people together; he had a queer little disagreeable sensation whenever they spoke to one another or looked at one another. Whenever Trafford and Marjorie found themselves in a group, there was Magnet in the midst of them. He knew the value of his Marjorie, and did not mean to lose her.... Being jointly baffled in this way was oddly stimulating to Marjorie's and Trafford's mutual predisposition. If you really want to throw people together, the thing to do--thank God for Ireland!--is to keep them apart. By the fourth day of this emotional incubation, Marjorie was thinking of Trafford to the exclusion of all her reading; and Trafford was lying awake at nights--oh, for half an hour and more--thinking of bold, decisive ways of getting at Marjorie, and bold, decisive things to say to her when he did. (But why she should be engaged to Magnet continued, nevertheless, to puzzle him extremely. It was a puzzle to which no complete solution was ever to be forthcoming....) § 11 At last that opportunity came. Marjorie had come with her mother into the village, and while Mrs. Pope made some purchases at the general shop she walked on to speak to Mrs. Blythe the washerwoman. Trafford suddenly emerged from the Red Lion with a soda syphon under each arm. She came forward smiling. "I say," he said forthwith, "I want to talk with you--badly." "And I," she said unhesitatingly, "with you." "How can we?" "There's always people about. It's absurd." "We'll have to meet." "Yes." "I have to go away to-morrow. I ought to have gone two days ago. Where _can_ we meet?" She had it all prepared. "Listen," she said. "There is a path runs from our shrubbery through a little wood to a stile on the main road." He nodded. "Either I will be there at three or about half-past five or--there's one more chance. While father and Mr. Magnet are smoking at nine.... I might get away." "Couldn't I write?" "No. Impossible." "I've no end of things to say...." Mrs. Pope appeared outside her shop, and Trafford gesticulated a greeting with the syphons. "All right," he said to Marjorie. "I'm shopping," he cried as Mrs. Pope approached. § 12