Our next three or four meetings are not so clearly defined. We did not meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same place. But there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different mood. We had met at the ruins at the far end of the great shrubbery, a huge shattered Corinthian of rather damaged stucco giving wide views of the hills towards Alfridsham between its three pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. It was an morning, I remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. And we were at cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that Mary did not mean to marry me, that she making any promise to me for the future, that all the heroic common cause I wanted with her, was quite alien to her dreams.  
"But Mary," I said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don't you love me? Don't you want me?"
 
"You know I love you, Stevenage," she said. "You know."
 
"But if two people love one another, they want to be always together, they want to belong to each other."
 
She looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning. "Stevenage," she said after one of those pauses of hers, "I want to belong to myself."
 
"Naturally," I said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then paused.
 
"Why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?" she asked. "Why must it be like that?"
 
I do not remem............