It's because I love you." Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human being had ever come so close to her before.
She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave great separate leaps at the last words.

She sat with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over the plain.

So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.
Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted.

She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.
"You might have known." He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.
"Well," sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, "that's the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me." He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.
There was a long silence.
"It's the most perfect thing in the world," Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction.

It was no longer merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.
In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.
"And what will Mr.Perrott say ?" she asked at the end of it.
"Dear old fellow," said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment.