She pressed her face against his coat, struggling to hold back her tears.

Moving his hands to her shoulders, and bending down, he touched the top of her head with his lips. Her hair, neatly divided by a carefully brushed parting, was so silky and fine that he felt as if his kiss had penetrated to the very centre of her skull. But she did not draw away from him. She only buried her forehead deeper in the folds of his heavy coat.

There was a tuft of loosely-growing stitchwort in the hedge by the gale-post; and this frail plant, as he surveyed it across her crouching form, mingled with his wild thoughts. Had anything like this ever happened to a man before⁠ ⁠… that on the day after such an ecstasy he should feel as he felt now? “I must be a monster!” he said to himself. “Am I going to begin snatching at the soul and body of every girl I meet down here?” With the cluster of stitchwort still illuminating his thought, as a flower-scroll illuminates a monkish script, he now struggled desperately to justify himself.