"At the expense of many whippings from old Bloggs, I learned to be precise in the use of words." "I know, hence you were not going to say 'grave.'" "You will allow me to choose my own words, madam." "Certainly, so long as you choose the right ones." She unhooked her hand, and we walked a minute or two without another word, she frowning, and I fuming. Then she said wistfully, "Why did you think I was cross?" "I feared I had offended you," said I hastily and innocently. She laughed long and merrily. "Old Bloggs taught you the silly rigmarole you men call logic, but he didn't teach you woman's logic, that's plain. Don't you see what I've made you do, Master Wheatman?" "Not yet, Mistress Waynflete." "Poof, slow-coach! I've made you admit that you were going to say 'cross' but altered it, too late, to 'grave.'" "You outrun me with your nimble and practised wit," said I, smiling. "And when did you offend me, think you?" "I answered you rather roughly when you took me up about the guinea." "Oh, then? Not at all. You snibbed me, but I richly deserved it." Another silence. "Well?" she said. "Go on! I say I richly deserved it. Go on!" "Go on where?" I asked testily. "You're not expecting me to say you didn't, are you?" "No, I'm not," she said, "but it was good practice trying to make you." So saying, she slipped her hand under my arm again, and we stepped it out together. The current of her thoughts now ran and glittered in the opposite direction. She made me for the moment her intimate, lifting up the veil over her past life, and giving me peeps and vistas of her wanderings and experiences. She jested and gibed. She sang little snatches of song in some foreign tongue. "You're sure you don't understand Italian?" she demanded, stopping short half-way through a bar, and quizzing me with her eyes, now blue as sapphires in the bright sunshine. "Not a word of it," said I. "A grave disadvantage," she said airily. "It's the only language one can love in." And off she struck again. Now she sang something soothing and sad, with a wistful lilt in it that died into a low wail. It needed no Italian to be understood, for it was written in the language of human experience. A woman's heart throbbed in the lilt and broke in the wail. This sweet interval of intimacy verging on friendship was ended by our close approach to the main road. We had been travelling, heedless of roads and tracks, across a champaign country, and the slope up to the top of Yarlet Bank now lay before us. I led the way, skulking behind such poor cover as the gaunt hedgerows provided, and, when only a hundred paces from the top, I asked her to crouch down, awaiting my signal to advance, while I crept forward on my hands and knees to the edge of the road which here climbed the brow of the hill through a deep cutting, along either margin of which ran a straggling hedge.