What a ridiculous situation ! How the Penhallows would laugh over it ! As for Romney , he , too , was angry with the trick impish chance had played him . He liked being the butt of an awkward situation as little as most men ; and certainly to be obliged to walk home over moonlit fields at one o'clock in the morning with the woman he had loved and never spoken to for fifteen years was the irony of fate with a vengeance . Would she think he had schemed for it ? And how the deuce did she come to be walking home from the wedding at all ? By the time they had crossed the field and reached the wild cherry lane beyond it , Lucinda 's anger was mastered by her saving sense of humour . She was even smiling a little maliciously under her fascinator . The lane was a place of enchantment -- a long , moonlit colonnade adown which beguiling wood nymphs might have footed it featly . The moonshine fell through the arching boughs and made a mosaic of silver light and clear-cut shadow for the unfriendly lovers to walk in . On either side was the hovering gloom of the woods , and around them was a great silence unstirred by wind or murmur . Midway in the lane Lucinda was attacked by a sentimental recollection . She thought of the last time Romney and she had walked home together through this very lane , from a party at `` young '' John 's . It had been moonlight then too , and -- Lucinda checked a sigh -- they had walked hand in hand . Just here , by the big gray beech , he had stopped her and kissed her . Lucinda wondered if he were thinking of it , too , and stole a look at him from under the lace border of her fascinator . But he was striding moodily along with his hands in his pockets , and his hat pulled down over his eyes , passing the old beech without a glance at it . Lucinda checked another sigh , gathered up an escaped flutter of voile , and marched on . Past the lane a range of three silvery harvest fields sloped down to Peter Penhallow 's brook -- a wide , shallow stream bridged over in the olden days by the mossy trunk of an ancient fallen tree . When Lucinda and Romney arrived at the brook they gazed at the brawling water blankly .
Lucinda remembered that she must not speak XXXXX Romney just in time to prevent an exclamation of dismay .
On around as at beyond from if of through to