"It's so ugly here. Shall we turn back and go up on the Hill?" "No. Yes." (They could come down before the Presbyterian Church was out.) "Let's walk very fast." They talked little on the way, but neither of them noticed the fact. They were approaching that point where _nur das reine Zusammensein_ was interchange enough. From the Dug Road they turned into the ravine. Ethan caught her by the hand, and they scrambled breathless to the top. "Let's rest here," he said. Val sat down under the elder-bush that grew in the cleft of the Hill. She looked up at him smiling, and then turned away her conscious eyes. Instead of sitting down, he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with a sense of vague uneasiness behind the tingling in his blood. "I suppose you know that I ought to have taken you home after your flat refusal to go to church?" "You aren't my master--yet." "Yes, I am." The blood flew to her face obedient to the call. "Yes," she said, slowly, "you are." He turned away, cursing his traitor tongue. "I've imposed upon you," he said, after a moment, flinging himself down on the grass a little distance off--"imposed upon you frightfully, if I've made you believe that. I'm far enough from being even master of myself." "Too late to try to patch it up now," she said; "the murder's out." He studied her. "I suppose you think you know me?" She smiled confidently. "You don't. I'm compounded of all the things that are most abhorrent to you." Still she smiled. The unconscious passion in the young eyes warmed his blood like wine. He moved a little nearer to her, and the mere movement broke the spell. The physical obviousness of the action stung him into self-criticism, self-contempt; and then as he turned his face away from his cousin's magnet eyes, he fell to criticising his self-criticism. Why couldn't he take things simply, naturally, as Val did? Vain ambition! He must submit to seeing, always and always, the skeleton under the fair flesh, the end from the beginning. "You are mistaken about me," he said. "I look out upon a world eternally different from the world you see." "What's it like?" "I hope you'll never quite realize." "Oh, I shall; but I sha'n't mind." "I might be doing you the best service in my power if I gave you a notion of how _much_ you'd mind." "I give you leave." He looked into the tender, happy eyes, and, "I haven't the heart," he said. "After all, it may not be necessary for you to lower your opinion of the world. It will, perhaps, do if you merely modify your opinion of me." "Don't you see I can't do that?" "Oh yes, you can." He pulled himself together and sat up. "You're at bottom such a rational creature. You've only to realize I'm a dreadful fraud. I've talked about--you'd be sure to find me out some time, so I may as well make a clean breast of it--" "It isn't anything you've ever _said_, that I depend upon." "Oh, really!" He threw back his head and laughed.