passed, except at great heights, and the wild roses were trooping in.
When the broom is in flame there seems to be no colour but yellow; but
when the wild roses come we remember that the broom was flaunting. It
was not quite a lady, for it insisted on being looked at; while these
light-hearted things are too innocent to know that there is anyone to
look. Grizel was sitting by the side of the stream, adorning her hat
fantastically with roses red and white and some that were neither.
They were those that cannot decide whether they look best in white or
red, and so waver for the whole of their little lives between the two
colours; there are many of them, and it is the pathetic thing about
wild roses. She did not pay much heed to her handiwork. What she was
saying to herself was that in another minute he and she would be
alone. Nothing else in the world mattered very much. Every bit of her
was conscious of it as the supreme event. Her fingers pressed it upon
the flowers. It was in her eyes as much as in her heart. He went on
casting his line, moving from stone to stone, dropping down the bank,
ascending it, as if the hooking of a trout was something to him. Was
he feeling to his marrow that as soon as those other two figures
rounded the bend in the stream he and she would have the world to
themselves? Ah, of course he felt it, but was it quite as much to him
as it was to her?

"Not quite so much," she said bravely to herself. "I don't want it to
be quite so much--but nearly."

[Illustration: She did not look up, she waited.]

And now they were alone as no two can be except those who love; for
when the third person leaves them they have a universe to themselves,
and it is closed in by the heavens, and the air of it is the