The sun was beginning to decline as he stood half a mile below the house, and the woods were dark above his head. A few moss-covered boulders lay in the path and the alders which grew, with their roots almost in the water, seemed to have stepped ashore to form a thicket through which his way ran. The twigs touched his face as he pushed through them. On the further side stood Cecilia, a few paces in front of him, at the edge of the river. She had heard the footsteps, and was looking straight at him as he emerged. At the sight of her face he knew, as surely as if he had been told it, that she was thinking of him. They stood side by side in a pregnant silence through which that third voice, present with every pair of lovers who meet alone, cried aloud to both. ‘I did not expect to see you here, sir,’ she began. (‘He has come because he cannot keep away; he has come because the very sight of the trees that surround your home have a glamour for him; because there is no peace any more for him, day nor night,’ said the voice to her.) (‘She has come here to think of you, to calm her heart, to tell herself that you are not, and never can be, anything to her, and then to contradict her own words,’ it cried to him.) He could not reply; the third voice was too loud. ‘Let us go on a little way,’ said Cecilia. Her lips would scarcely move, and the voice and the beating of her heart was stopping her breath. Gilbert turned, and they went through the alders, he holding back the twigs for her to pass. (‘He loves you! he loves you! he loves you!’ cried the voice.) As she brushed past him through the narrow way her nearness seemed to make the scar on his face throb, and bring again to him the thrill of her fingers upon his cheek. He could bear it no more. They were at the end of the thicket, and, as she stepped out of it in front of him, he sprang after her, catching her in his arms. ‘Cecilia!’ he said, almost in a whisper. He had grown white. She drew herself away with an impulse which her womanhood made natural. He followed her fiercely, on his face the set look of a man in a trance. There are some things in a woman stronger than training, stronger than anything that may have hedged her in from her birth, and they await but the striking of an hour and the touch of one man. As he stretched out his arms anew she turned towards him and threw herself into them. Their lips met, again--again. He held her close in silence. ‘Ah, I am happy,’ she exclaimed at last. ‘And I have been afraid to tell you, torturing myself to think that you would repulse me. Cecilia, you understand what you are saying--you will never repent this?’ ‘Never,’ she said. ‘I shall love you all my life.’ He touched the dark hair that rested against his shoulder. ‘I am not worthy of it,’ he said. ‘My only claim to you is that I adore you. I cannot think why the whole world is not in love with you.’ She laughed softly.