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During those weeks he had never met her anywhere, either at Conster or outside it; but one Saturday at noon, as he was coming away from the shop, he met her surprisingly on foot in the station road. He pulled up and spoke to her, and she told him she was on her way to the station in hopes of an early train. The Singer had broken down with magneto trouble and she had been obliged to leave it for repair—meantime her father wanted her back early, as there was always a lot of dispensary work to do on a Saturday afternoon.

"Well, if you don't mind a ride in a dying Ford . . ."

He hardly dared listen to her answer, he tried to read it as it came into her eyes while he spoke.

"Of course I don't mind. I should love it—and it's really most frightfully good of you."

So she climbed up beside him, and soon her round bright eyes were looking at him from between her fur cap and huge fur collar, as they had looked that first morning at Starvecrow . . . He felt the love rising in his throat . . . tender and silly . . . he could not speak; and he soon found that she would rather he didn't. Not only was the Ford's death-rattle rather loud but she seemed to find the same encouragement to thought as he in that long monotonous jolt through the Weald of Kent. He did not have to lift himself far out of the stream of his thoughts when he looked at her or spoke, but hers were evidently very far away. With a strange mixture of melancholy and satisfaction, he realised that he must count for little in her life—practically nothing at all. Even if she were not Peter's claim she could never be his—not only on account of her age, six years older than he, but because the fact that she loved Peter showed that it was unlikely she could ever love Gervase, Peter's contrast . . . In his heart was a sweet ache of sorrow, the thrill which comes with the first love-pain.