For the months of her engagement to that man, Marcus Blaydon, her thought was that this was the punishment that was laid upon her for the hardness of her heart--this prospect of living with a man who could never be anything to her but an object of dislike. He never awoke in her a slumbering passion--not even the passion of hate. She merely disliked him as she disliked a foggy day; and yet she was condemned to spend the remainder of her life with him with love shut out. Was that to be her punishment for having rejected the many offers of love which had been laid at her feet by men whom she liked well but could not love? And then with the suddenness with which a great blessing or a great calamity is sent by Heaven (according to the Teachers) there had been sent to her the two best things in the world--Freedom and Love. She knew that if this man had been one of her father’s shepherds and had asked her to love him she would have given herself to him. Her sense of being on the way to fill a splendid position socially was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was beloved by a man whom she loved as she never thought it would be given to her to love any man. That was her dominant thought--nay, her only thought--while she walked through the lanes to her home. And it never occurred to her that she was reckoning among her possessions a great gift which had not yet been offered to her. It never occurred to her that she might be mistaken in taking his love for granted. Even if weeks and months were to pass without his coming to her, she would still not entertain so unworthy a thought as that he was not coming to her. But she was not subjected to the ordeal of his absence. He came to her on Monday morning, the first thing. It was surely ridiculous for him to set out on this mission before the workers in the fields had left their beds; but so he did. He went forth and wandered for miles across the Downs. He went within sight of the sea, by a curious impulse, and he sat on the turf in the early sunlight, listening to the great bass of the breaking waves beneath him and to the exquisite fluttering flutings, of a lark in the sky above him. Then he turned and found the road that led down to the snuggest of villages--he owned every house, though he did not know it--and up again to a region of ploughed fields--enormous spaces of purple-brown surrounded by great irregular hedges of yellow gorse.