"You will come with me and have breakfast. I wonder if any man up to this day ever asked a girl to marry him before breakfast."
"I wonder. But a chap feels so much fresher in the early morning, I think it should be tried more frequently."
"It was a bold experiment, Jack. But it might only succeed when carried out in connection with the dairy industry."
"That is how you come to be up so early. Shall I have a chance of seeing your dad if I go with you? I suppose a dad has always to be reckoned with."
"No one has to be reckoned with except myself in this matter. I am myself, and I know myself, and will obey myself and none other this time--this time."
She spoke with some vehemence, and her last sentence was uttered with a touch of bitterness. He knew what she meant. Providence had come to her rescue once, but a second interposition on her behalf was too much to expect. He could appreciate her feeling.
"You will not have to meet my father until you please," she said. "Just now he is miles away--at Galsworthy. We shall be alone."
"I'll not shudder at the prospect," said he. "We can't have everything in this world, can we?"
They went together up the lane to the farm with as much decorum as was consistent with the possibility of being discovered by some watcher in the fields, and they had breakfast face to face at an old Tudor table in one of the panelled rooms of the farmhouse, and beneath the old oak beams--a lovely room that had undergone no change in even the most trifling detail for three hundred years. The bowls of wallflowers on the table and on the lattice shelf were of blue delft, and the plate-rack on the wall held some dishes of the same colour.
"You suppose all this is old?" he said, looking around.
"Oh, no; but it wasn't bought in my lifetime," she replied. "I can show you in an account book exactly what was paid for everything. The date of the last entry in the book is the 'Eve of the Feast of the Purification, 1604.'"
"Three hundred years ago. But that's nothing in the history of your family. Have you a ledger that goes back to the Heptarchy?"
"I'm afraid that that one is mislaid. But the eggs are fresh; if we don't boil them now they will be three hours old at nine."