His face this day was grey with the weariness of a sleepless night, and his enemy, asthma, was hard upon him--a man's asthma, that is a fierce thing because it is not yielded to gracefully, but is struggled against.
"Oh, but you're ill, Mr.Bates," she said, relapsing into that repeated expression of yesterday.
"I'm no so ill as I--I seem," he panted, "but that's neither here--nor there." This was their greeting.

Round them the grass was littered by old picnic papers, and this vulgar marring of the woodland glade was curiously akin to the character of this crucial interview between them, for the beauty of its inner import was overlaid with much that was common and garish.

A rude bench had been knocked together by some picnicker of the past, and on this Bates was fain to sit down to regain his breath.

Sissy stood near him, plucking at some coloured leaves she had picked up in her restlessness.
"You think of going back to the old place," she said, because he could not speak.
"Aye." "Miss Bates is keeping pretty well ?"--this in conventional tone that was oddly mortised into the passionate working of her mind.
"Oh, aye." "Why wouldn't you sell it and live in a town ?" "It's the only air there I can be breathing," said he; the confession was wrung from him by his present struggle for breath.

"I'm not fit for a town." "I hear them saying down at the hotel that you're awfully ill." "It's not mortal, the doctor says." "You'll need someone to take care of you, Mr.Bates." "Oh, I'll get that." He spoke as if setting aside the subject of his welfare with impatience, and she let it drop; but because he was yet too breathless to speak his mind, she began again: "I don't mind if you don't sell, for I don't want to get any money." "Oh, but ye can sell when I'm gone; it'll be worth more then than now.
I'm just keeping a place I can breathe in, ye understand, as long as I go on breathing." She pulled the leaves in her hand, tearing them lengthwise and crosswise.
"What I want--to ask of ye now is--what I want to ask ye first is a solemn question.