“You are glad we’ve met, Gerda, dear?” he asked.

She raised her eyes. They had the tension of a sudden, difficult resolution in them.

“Do men ever leave girls alone after they’ve married them?”

The words were so unexpected that he could only press her cold fingers and glance away from those troubled eyes. What his own gaze encountered was a single tarnished celandine, whose bent stalk lay almost flat on a wisp of rain-sodden grass.

“When we’re married,” he responded gravely, after a pause, during which he felt as if with his own hands he were launching a rigged ship into a misty sea, “I’ll leave you alone just as much as you want!”