It was in the of something evasive in Mary's character that she let me hear first of her engagement to Justin through the Times. Away there in Scotland she got I suppose new perspectives, new ideas; the glow of our passion faded. The thing must have been drawing in upon her for some time. Perhaps she had meant to tell me of it all that night when she had summoned me to Burnmore. Looking back now I am the more persuaded that she did. But the thing came to me in London with the effect of an immense treachery. Within a day or so of the newspaper's announcement she had written me a long letter answering some argument of mine, and saying nothing whatever of the people about her. Even then Justin must have been asking her to marry him. Her mind must have been full of that question. Then came a storm of disappointment, and anger with this . I can still feel myself writing and destroying letters to her, letters of , of protest. Oddly enough I cannot recall the letter that at last I sent her, but it is of the weak boyishness of my position that I sent it in our usual manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of our relationship. "No," she back, "you do not understand. I cannot write. I must talk to you."  
We had a secret meeting.
 
With Beatrice Normandy's she managed to get away for the better part of the day, and we spent a long morning in argument in the Botanical Gardens—that obvious solitude—and afterwards we lunched upon ham and beer at a little open-air restaurant near the Broad Walk and talked on until nearly four. We were so young that I think we both felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. There is something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too, naïvely noble and . I can never determine if older people are less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. I still recall the autumnal of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which I had never been before, and which I have never revisited—a memory of walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of bridges going nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon a lawn and a wide path leading to a frontage of .
 
I must have been resentful and bitter in the beginning of that talk. I do not remember that I had any command of the situation or did anything but protest throughout that day. I was too full of the egotism of the young lover to mark Mary's moods and feelings. It was only afterwards that I came to understand that she was not and following the course that was to separate us, that she was taking it with and regrets. Yet she plainly enough, she spoke with a manifest of feeling. And while I had neither the grasp nor the to get behind her mind I perceive now as I think things out that Lady Ladislaw had both watched and acted, had her daughter's ideas, sown her mind with suggestions, imposed upon her a conception of her situation that now dominated all her thoughts.
 
"Dear Stephen," Mary, "I love you. I do, clearly, definitely, deliberately love you. Haven't I told you that? Haven't I made that plain to you?"
 
"But you are going to marry Justin!"
 
"Stephen dear, can I possibly marry you? Can I?"
 
"Why not? Why not make the adventure of life with me? Dare!"
 
She looked down on me. She was sitting upon a parapet of the brickwork and I was below her. She seemed to be weighing possibilities.
 
"Why not?" I cried. "Even now. Why not run away with me, throw our two lives together? Do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of things! Let us go somewhere together——"
 
"But Stephen," she asked softly, "where?"
 
"Anywhere!"
 
She spoke as an elder might do to a child. "No! tell me where—exactly. Where would it be? Where should we go? How should we live? Tell me. Make me see it, Stephen."
 
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