But when Ben joined them he was very talkative, and full of his own concerns, and was so interesting that his mother put Davison off, and it was ten o’clock before she actually left the drawing-room. After a little conflict with herself Mary prepared to follow. She would have liked to stay, but felt herself awkward, and uncomfortable, and full of a thousand hesitations. ‘Are you going too?’ Ben said, as he saw her gathering up her work; and there was a tone of disappointment in his voice that went to her heart. ‘I thought you might be tired,’ she said, faltering. ‘Tired! the first night at home! I suppose the poor dear mother has stayed as long as is good for her; but you are not an invalid, Mary,’ said Ben; ‘you don’t mean to say ten o’clock is the end of the evening for you? And I have a hundred things to tell you, and to ask you. Put on your shawl, and come out for a breath of fresh air. The moon always shines at Renton. I’ll ring for somebody to bring you a shawl.’ ‘I’ll run and get one,’ said Mary; and she stayed up-stairs for a few moments to take breath and compose herself. It was very silly of her, of course, to be excited; but she reflected that it was not simply the innocent stroll with her cousin in the moonlight for which she was afraid, but the possibility of a return to the subject of Millicent, of which he had spoken to her last time he was at Renton. He was standing outside the window waiting for her when she came down, and they wandered away together, instinctively taking that path towards the river. So many moonlight walks on that same path glanced over Mary’s memory as they walked,--childish ones, when the cousins played hide-and-seek behind the great, smooth, shining boles of the beeches,--merry comings-home from water-parties when they were all boys and girls together. And then that walk, which was the last she had taken with Ben. He did not say much for some minutes. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of all those old recollections. ‘When I went away the moon was shining,’ he said at last abruptly, ‘and I suppose it has been shining and the river running and the branches rustling all this time. How strange it seems! I wonder if I have been dreaming all these seven years?’ ‘I daresay you have for a great part of the time,’ Mary said, with an effort to be playful. ‘I am sure I have at least----’ ‘I hope so, considering my mother’s account of what you have been doing,’ said Ben. And then he made a pause, and said, as if he did it on purpose to stir up every possibility of discomfort in her, ‘Do you remember our last talk here?’