"Will you walk, mistress?" he said, and she, feeling that it were an unkindness not to do his will, assented gravely. They moved down the sloping lawn, side by side, Sir Rowland leaning on his cane, bareheaded, his feathered hat tucked under his arm. Before them the river's smooth expanse, swollen and yellow with the recent rains, glowed like a sheet of copper, so that it blurred the sight to look upon it long.
A few steps they took with no word uttered, then Sir Rowland spoke. "With this foreboding that is on me," said he, "I could not go without seeing you, without saying something that I may never have another chance of saying; something that--who knows?--but for the emprise to which I am now wedded you had never heard from me."
He shot her a furtive, sidelong glance from under his heavy, beetling brows, and now, indeed, he observed a change ripple over the composure of her face like a sudden breeze across a sheet of water. The deep lace collar at her throat rose and fell, and her fingers toyed nervously with a ribbon of her grey bodice. She recovered in an instant, and threw up entrenchments against the attack she saw he was about to make.
"You exaggerate, I trust," said she. "Your forebodings will be proved groundless. You will return safe and sound from this venture, as indeed I hope you may."
That was his cue. "You hope it?" he cried, arresting his step, turning, and imprisoning her left hand in his right. "You hope it? Ah, if you hope for my return, return I will; but unless I know that you will have some welcome for me such as I desire from you, I think..." his voice quivered cleverly, "I think, perhaps, it were well if... if my forebodings were not as groundless as you say they are. Tell me, Ruth..."
But she interrupted him. It was high time, she thought. Her face he saw was flushed, her eyes had hardened somewhat. Calmly she disengaged her hand.
"What is't you mean?" she asked. "Speak, Sir Rowland, speak plainly, that I may give you a plain answer."
It was a challenge in which another man had seen how hopeless was his case, and, accepting defeat, had made as orderly a retreat as still was possible. But Sir Rowland, stricken in his vanity, went headlong on to utter rout.
"Since you ask me in such terms I will be plain, indeed," he answered her. "I mean..." He almost quailed before the look that met him from her intrepid eyes. "Do you not see my meaning, Ruth?"