"In _The Magnet_," he said, with a sudden confiding impulse, "the men do propose so well. Now in real life they don't. Poor beggars, they'd like to, but they can't. Most difficult thing, but you'd never guess it from _The Magnet_. Just look at Jack!--wasn't that his name?--how he reels it all out! Shows how much he cares. Says a lot of really good things--not copy-book, I will say that for him. Puts it uncommonly well about not being good enough for her, just as Mr. Stirling would himself if he were proposing. That's what I felt when I read it. Jack never would have had the nerve to say all that, but of course a clever chap like Mr. Stirling, sitting comfortably in his study, with lots of time and no woman to flurry him, could make it up." Annette did not answer. Perhaps she did not want to flurry him. "I could never _say_ anything like that," said Roger, flicking a fly off Merrylegs' back, "but I might feel it. I _do_ feel it, and more." "That is the only thing that matters," said Annette, with a tremor in her voice. "This is not the moment!" whispered Roger's bachelor instinct, in sudden panic at its imminent extinction. "I'd better wait till later in the afternoon," he assented cautiously to himself. "A dogcart's not the place." They crossed the common, and drove through an ancient forest of oak and holly in which kings had hunted, and where the last wolf in England had been killed. And Roger told her of the great flood in the year of Waterloo, when the sea burst over the breakwater between Haliwater and Kirby, and carried away the old Hundred bridge, and forced the fishes into the forest, where his grandfather had seen them weeks afterwards sticking in the bushes. When they emerged once more into the open the homely landscape had changed. The blackberried hedges were gone, replaced by long lines of thin firs, marking the boundaries between the fields. Sea mews were wheeling and calling among the uncouth hummocked gorse, which crowded up on either side of the white poppy-edged road. There was salt in the air. Roger pointed with his whip. "The Rieben again," he said. But could this mighty river with its mile-wide water be indeed the Rieben? Just beyond it, close beside it, divided only by a narrow thong of shingle, lay the sea. And Roger told Annette how at Mendlesham Mill the Rieben had all but reached the sea, and then had turned aside and edged along, stubbornly, mile after mile, parallel with it, almost within a stone's throw of it. "But it never seems all to fall in and have done with it," he said, pointing to where it melted away into the haze, still hugging the sea, but always with the thong of shingle stretched between.