Duty—that’s to say complying With whate’er’s expected here . ..

With the form conforming duly,

Senseless what it meaneth truly . . .

‘Tis the stern and prompt suppressing,

    As an obvious deadly sin,

All the questing and the guessing

    Of the soul’s own soul within:

‘Tis the coward acquiescence

    In a destiny’s behest . . .

—A. H. Clough, “Duty” (1841)

They arrived at the White Lion just before ten that night. The lights were still on in Aunt Tranter’s house; a curtain moved as they passed. Charles performed a quick toilet and leaving Sam to unpack, strode manfully up the hill. Mary was overjoyed to see him; Aunt Tranter, just behind her, was pinkly wreathed in welcoming smiles. She had had strict orders to remove herself as soon as she had greeted the traveler: there was to be no duenna nonsense that evening. Ernestina, with her customary estimation of her own dignity, had remained in the back sitting room.

She did not rise when Charles entered, but gave him a long reproachful look from under her eyelashes. He smiled.

“I forgot to buy flowers in Exeter.”

“So I see, sir.”

“I was in such haste to be here before you went to bed.”

She cast down her eyes and watched her hands, which were engaged in embroidery. Charles moved closer, and the hands rather abruptly stopped work and turned over the small article at which they were working.

“I see I have a rival.”

“You deserve to have many.”

He knelt beside her and gently raised one of her hands and kissed it. She slipped a little look at him.

“I haven’t slept a minute since you went away.”

“I can see that by your pallid cheeks and swollen eyes.”

She would not smile. “Now you make fun of me.”

“If this is what insomnia does to you I shall arrange to have an alarm bell ringing perpetually in our bedroom.”

She blushed. Charles rose and sat beside her and drew her head round and kissed her mouth and then her closed eyes, which after being thus touched opened and stared into his, every atom of dryness gone.

He smiled. “Now let me see what you are embroidering for your secret admirer.”

She held up her work. It was a watch pocket, in blue velvet—one of those little pouches Victorian gentlemen hung by their dressing tables and put their watches in at night. On the hanging flap there was embroidered a white heart with the initials C and E on either side; on the face of the pouch was begun, but not finished, a couplet in gold thread. Charles read it out loud.

“’Each time thy watch thou wind’ ... and how the deuce is that to finish?”

“You must guess.”

Charles stared at the blue velvet.

“Thy wife her teeth will grind’?”

She snatched it out of sight.

“Now I shan’t tell. You are no better than a cad.” A “cad” in those days meant an omnibus conductor, famous for their gift of low repartee.

“Who would never ask a fare of one so fair.”

“False flattery and feeble puns are equally detestable.”

“And you, my dearest, are adorable when you are angry.”

“Then I shall forgive you—just to be horrid.”

She turned a little away from him then, though his arm remained around her waist and the pressure of his hand on hers was returned. They remained in silence a few moments. He kissed her hand once more.

“I may walk with you tomorrow morning? And we’ll show the world what fashionable lovers we are, and look bored, and quite unmistakably a marriage of convenience?”

She smiled; then impulsively disclosed the watch pocket.

“’Each time thy watch thou wind, Of love may I thee remind.’”

“My sweetest.”

He gazed into her eyes a moment longer, then felt in his pocket and placed on her lap a small hinged box in dark-red morocco.

“Flowers of a kind.”

Shyly she pressed the little clasp back and opened the box; on a bed of crimson velvet lay an elegant Swiss brooch: a tiny oval mosaic of a spray of flowers, bordered by alternate pearls and fragments of coral set in gold. She looked dewily at Charles. He helpful............