He began, three or four times, as he went along, that game with the white pebbles against the brown, and then remembered that it was silly, and pulled himself up. He would not like Patty to know that he had a habit of doing that. He was aware, instinctively, that it would seem very silly to her. Three, four, and five; and a great big one that ought to count three at least for the right hand man. No; he wouldn’t do it; it was silly; it was like a child, not a man. What, he wondered, was she going to do? Not go to the rector, because she had herself objected to that. Another way--he wondered what other way there could be--that dispensed with both parson and clerk? But that, thank Heaven, was Patty’s affair, and she had promised that she would do it. Seven brown ones in a row; such luck for the left-hand man! But no, no; he would not pay any attention to that. Patty would think him a fool for his pains. What was she doing--she that knew exactly what it was best to do? What a woman she was, up to everything; seeing with one look of her eye what he never would have found out, that it was not the right thing to speak to the rector, nor to the clerk, who was still worse than the rector. How much better it was that it should be all in her hands! How was a man to know, who had never been married himself, who knew nothing about such things, how to put up banns? What were banns? He had heard people asked in church, but he was not sure about the other name. Was it something, perhaps, to hang up like a picture? These thoughts did not pass through Gervase’s mind in so many words, but floated after each other vaguely, swimming in a dumb sort of consciousness. He had, perhaps, never had so many all turning round and crossing each other before. Generally it was only the pebbles he thought of as he walked unless when it was Patty. It gave him a strange sort of bewildering sense of life to feel how many things he was thinking of--such a crowd of different things.