“Well!”

“Why, he’d always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he’d be.”

“Of course he would—I, that is.”

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t show off in that way by herself, I shan’t marry—at least yet.”

“That’s a terrible wooden story.”

At this elegant criticism of her statement, Bathsheba made an addition to her dignity by a slight sweep away from him.

“Upon my heart and soul, I don’t know what a maid can say stupider than that,” said Oak. “But dearest,” he continued in a palliative voice, “don’t be like it!” Oak sighed a deep honest sigh—none the less so in that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. “Why won’t you have me?” he said appealingly, creeping round the holly to reach her side.

“I cannot,” she said, retreating.

“But why?” he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever reaching her, and facing over the bush.

“Because I don’t love you.”

“Yes, but——”

She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all. “I don’t love you,” she said.”

“But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.”

“Oh, Mr. Oak—that’s very fine! You’d get to despise me.”

“Never,” said Mr. Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. “I shall do one thing in this life—one thing certain—that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.” His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.

“It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much,” she said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around for some means of escape from her moral dilemma. “How I wish I hadn’t 

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