Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam around them.

The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and less self-conscious than usual, and Mary, indeed, was overcome by a sort of light-headedness which made it seem to her that it mattered very little what happened next.

It mattered so little, indeed, that she felt herself on the point of saying to Ralph: "I love you; I shall never love anybody else.

Marry me or leave me; think what you like of me--I don't care a straw." At the moment, however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rust-like bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the steam of her own breath.

It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, "I love you," or whether she said, "I love the beech-trees," or only "I love--I love." "Do you know, Mary," Ralph suddenly interrupted her, "I've made up my mind." Her indifference must have been superficial, for it disappeared at once.