HUGH was standing at the dining-room window of the Chalkpits at Mannington, opening letters, and looking with slightly pained wonder at the hopelessness of the morning. A south-westerly gale had set in last night, and through the hours of darkness it had increased to a hurricane, and though any reasonable gale might have been expected to blow itself out in this time, or anyhow to show signs of tiring, this particular one seemed merely to have blown itself in, just as it had blown in the window of his dressing-room half an hour ago. Outside the garden was cowering beneath these blasts, and the scuds of driving rain that crossed the water-meadow beyond like clouds of driven smoke, blotting out the landscape, flung themselves against the streaming panes. The terrace walk, that last night had been so neat and orderly, was now but a series of pools of wind-ruffled water, dotted over by twigs and branches torn from the tortured trees, and early seedlings that yesterday had shown so brave an upstanding were now but a little plaster of tiny stem and infinitesimal leaf embedded in mud. Creepers had been torn from the wall, leaves battered from them, and the Japanese cherry-tree at the end that had been a cascade of pink frothing blossom was now gaunt and bare. It seemed curious that the laws of Nature demanded so hysterical an outburst.

Hugh, like all mercurially minded persons, was a good deal affected by climatic conditions, and he felt somewhat depressed. Edith, too, had evidently finished breakfast and gone to see the cook, for Hugh certainly was very late that morning. Her absence was depressing too, and his letters were dull, and they had to go to town to-morrow, and he distinctly did not want to. It was cold too, quite disgustingly cold, and to fill up the time while he was waiting for his fresh tea to be brought in he had the brilliant idea of lighting the fire.

The fire was admirably laid (everything in the house was done exactly as it should be done, and in no other way), and paper caught stick, and stick licked coal instantaneously. Almost instantaneously also a beautiful cloud of stinging smoke was driven into the room. That would never do, and Hugh spent an active five minutes in beating out the fire he had just lit. But it warmed him. Also his tea came, and like a sensible young man he sat with his back to the depressing window, propped up the daily paper against the teapot, and took fish and bacon on one plate. But the first thing he saw in his paper was that the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, began on May 1 with “Lohengrin,” in which the name part would be taken by the new young English tenor. That was no news to him, but print settled it. Hugh read no further, but said “Oh, lor!”

That had been Edith’s doing, for he himself had almost taken it for granted that his engagement to her cancelled his engagement to the syndicate, which indeed at the time had only got to the point that he had told Reuss he would sing, and Reuss had not even at that moment told them. For it was quite a different thing for an unemployed bachelor to spend his winter (not in Frankfort, it is true, for Reuss was coming to London) in weeks of really hard work from a lately married man doing it. But he had been extraordinarily wide of the mark when he supposed that Edith would agree with him.

“Ah, Hughie, you mustn’t throw it up!” she said. “Why, my darling, even before——”

“Before what?” asked the guileful Hugh.

“Before July 24th it was one of the things in my life that I really most looked forward to, that this year I should see you as Lohengrin and Tristan. And what do you suppose it will be to me now?” she asked softly.

“But if we are not married till September we shall have just three minutes of honeymoon,” he said. “Because I can’t sing unless I study straight away from October.”

She smiled at him.

“Do you know what my honeymoon is going to be?” she asked.

“Three minutes.”

“No, being your wife.”

And then again his eyes glowed like coals.

“Besides, Andrew Robb taught you to want to express yourself,” she said, “to hold people; and he hasn’t taught you different.”

Hugh sighed.

“Yes, he has,” he said. “He has taught me that—oh, that nothing matters except Andrew Robb!”

“Well, it is quite a big piece of Andrew Robb that begs you not to give it up. All Andrew Robb begs you not to,” she added.

“Oh, blow Andrew Robb!” said Hugh. “Edith, what do you want?”

“Oh, Hugh, I want you to sing so!” she said. “I shall be so proud of you!”

They were still at Cookham when this occurred, on the eve of Peggy’s departure to Marienbad with her husband, and on the moment she came out on to the lawn where they were sitting.

“Oh, what a bad reason,” said Hugh; “as if you couldn’t be proud of a person all alone! Love in a cottage among the earwigs is better than the gilded throng. I’ll sing to you as often as you like at Mannington. What have other people got to do with you and me? Let’s ask Peggy.”

Edith laughed.

“Yes, do,” she said, knowing how a woman must feel about a thing like this.

“I shall tell it her as if it wasn’t you and me,” said Hugh. “Oh, Peggy,” he cried, “we want you!”

She came.

“Once upon a time,” said Hugh, talking very fast, “there was a woman with an extraordinary ability for acting, and she and another man fell in love with each other, and he said, ‘I jolly well won’t have you acting any more now! You’ve got to attend to me.’ Wasn’t he right?”

Peggy had given one short gasp, but checked herself.

“Why, of course he was,” she said.

Hugh turned to Edith.

“Didn’t I say so?” he began.

“Hush!” said Edith. “Peggy, once upon a time there was a man who used to sit in Piccadilly Circus and tell stories to the public. At least, he was going to. But then he and another woman fell in love with each other, and she said, ‘I’—what was it?—‘I jolly well won’t have you telling stories any more in public!’ Wasn’t she right?”

Peggy turned a face of scorn.

“No, she was an ass,” she said.

“But why?” asked Hugh. “You said the man was right.”

“Of course. Oh, you dears, may I guess? It’s about the opera next year. Make him sing, Edith. Hughie, you are so elementary!”

It had been settled thus, and now this morning when he read the first two lines of this paragraph the whole scene had come back to him with extraordinary vividness. It was right somehow, according to the sisters, that he should go on with his life just as keenly as—no, more keenly, for his wife had spurred and stimulated him to work, than before; while it was right for her, if he proposed anything—a stroll on the downs, a saunter in the garden, a game of billiards—that she should join him, leaving the half-written word, the unfinished speech of her play. She did so, at any rate, and at this moment she came in rather hurriedly.

“Hughie, I never knew you were down,” she said. “I never heard you come. What a dreadfully uncomfortable breakfast! Why don’t you arrange things better? Oh, what a day! Isn’t it a shame for our last day here? But I suppose Providence can’t always arrange the weather just for us. Let’s light fires and pull down blinds.”

“I tried that one,” said Hugh.

“I know it’s a beast; it always smokes in a bad wind. Any news? I haven’t looked at the paper.”

“The opera will open on May 1,” said he. “The young English tenor—— Ha, ha!”

“Oh, Hughie, don’t laugh with a scornful wonder! It’s much worse for me.”

Hugh felt a little cheered as Edith arranged his teapot and toast-rack, and put the marmalade within reach.

“Yes, but your voice won’t crack like fiddle-strings,” he said, “and your knees won’t tremble so that the swan’s head falls off. ‘Das sÜsz Lied verhÄlt!’ And the large couch in the most extraordinary bedroom where a large procession of German nobles have conducted me will fall into small fragments. Oh, why did you and Peggy conspire?”

Edith sat down and poured out a cup of tea for him.

“Now, speak truth, Hugh,” she said. “Supposing you got a telegram now this instant to say that there was to be no opera in town this year, and that for compensation the syndicate placed twenty-five million pounds to your credit, wouldn’t you be disappointed? Wouldn’t you feel extremely flat?”

Hugh considered this a moment, until his mouth was free for speech again.

“Yes, I should,” he said.

“Well, then?”

On the moment the butler entered with a telegram.

Hugh tore it open.

“Clearly the twenty-five million pounds,” he said, “and I shall feel flat. Oh, no; it’s Peggy! May she come down for the night? Not reply paid either. Sixpence to the bad instead of twenty-five million to the good. Yes, get me a form,” he said to the man.

For one moment an impulse flashed through Edith’s mind, bidding her say, “It’s our last day here, Hugh.” But she did not give voice to it.

“What luck!” said he. “And we’ll all travel up together to-morrow.”

Then he looked up at his wife, and all she had thought came into his mind also.

“Or shall we say ‘No’?” he asked. “Why, it’s our last evening here. Let’s spend it alone instead. Shall we?”

“It would be rather nice,” said Edith.

“Let us then. We are dining with her to-morrow, aren’t we?”

The man had brought back a telegraph form, and Hugh filled it in.

“Peggy understands,” he remarked as he wrote. Then he handed it to his wife.

“Will that do?” he asked.

She read it to herself.

“Sorry—but—we—don’t—want—you—last—evening—here—Edith—Hugh.”

She laughed.

“Peggy could hardly fail to understand,” she said.

The opera syndicate this year had taken what Hugh called a “turn for the Bayreuth,” or, in other words, a turn for the better, and had made it understood that stage managers and producers must really see the swans’ heads did not come off any longer, that Siegfried’s raven appeared more or less at the right moment, and that the evening star in “TannhÄuser” should shine before it was sung to, and not burst into being, though with incomparable splendour, some minutes after Wolfran had quite finished addressing it. Italian opera, of course, could still look after itself, since a few songs here and there by Melba and Caruso was the utmost that anybody in his senses could possibly require; but German opera, they suddenly felt, might perhaps gain a little if everybody, orchestra, principals, and chorus alike, studied a little more and tried to get some kind of uniformity. In consequence of this laudable ideal it had been necessary for Hugh to go up to town constantly during the last month or two to be put through his scenes, the mere acting of them, with Elsa, Isolde, and Elisabeth under Reuss’s direction; and often, too, had Reuss been down here, and many had been the evenings when, in the big hall, with chalked lines for the position of couches, rows of nobles, and front of the stage, Hugh, with Edith as mute heroine, had gone through his part, with Reuss at the piano, ruthless to anything slovenly, eagle-eared for any false inflexion of voice, slurred pronunciation, or wrongly taken breath, but, hardly less rarely, full of praise and appreciation. For he believed no less than Edith that the real Wagner hero had come at last, him whom the musical world had been waiting for so long, who while yet young should have developed the perfection and maturity of voice. It was for this very reason that he was so hard on Hugh, so unremitting and exacting in his demands, for there was so much to be got out of him.

Edith used always to be present at these lessons, ready to be the heroine if action was needed, and of late, since she had got to know the scenes by heart, instead of Herr Reuss shouting out the cues from the piano or, if more than usually carried away, singing them in a high, ridiculous falsetto, she had gone through whole acts with her husband, speaking the words, for instance, of the love-duet in Tristan, slowly and rhythmically to the music, so that the scene could go through exactly as it would be played. And it was then that Reuss most felt what Hugh was capable of. No acting, no singing, if worth anything, is spontaneous; every gesture, every note, every word and position had to be carefully learned, but when that was done it was the great singer who could light it all with passion without blurring anything that he had learned. And then he would watch the two, as he had watched them the last time he had been down here, a couple of days ago, still eager to criticise, still on the alert for a fault of any sort, but finding nothing. At the end he had said “Bravo, bravo!” and wiped his spectacles.

Then he got up and held out his hand to Edith.

“It was you who made him sing,” he cried, “not I. Ach, if only you were his Isolde, how we would drive that fat London off its head!”

That fat London, however, had to be driven off its head without Edith’s direct assistance, though this morning she did indirectly what she could by inducing Hugh to go and practise, when he had finished breakfast, and refusing to allow him to sit with her in her room and talk. And even though she had declared it to be shameful that their last day in the country should be so wet, she was extremely well content to think of the privacy which this streaming gale would give them. Canon Alington, it is true, had proposed to drop in to lunch, since he would be on his way back from some district-visiting to cottages on the confines of his parish during the morning, but that most conscientious of men, she felt certain, would postpone even a duty to a slightly more propitious morning.

There was a compact between her and Hugh that when he was doing his lessons she also should do “lessons,” so that he should not feel that everybody else (which meant her) was leading a life of leisured ease while he sang over and over again some faulty phrase or arrived by endless repetition at a smooth enunciation of some half-dozen notes which Reuss had underlined, and this morning, with a sense of heroic effort and almost paralysing distaste, she saw that the nature of her lessons was clearly indicated for her by the very large pile of shiny American-cloth volumes that were stacked on her writing-table, and were clearly what is known as that most unattractive library “the books.” She remembered also with fatal and unerring distinctness, she was afraid, that they had been stacked there just a month ago on a morning of glorious sunny March weather—“daffodil weather,” as Hugh called it—and that she had in a moment of mortal weakness decreed that they should “run on” just because on the morning when they ought to have been settled she wanted to go out instantly with Hugh. So she took a large sheet of sermon-paper and wrote “Books. April 15th” at the top. That looked so businesslike that she was quite encouraged to proceed. So below she wrote “£. s. d.” high up on the right-hand margin of the paper and “Fishmonger” a little below on the left.

Fishmonger proved rather depressing, because it looked as if everybody lived exclusively on salmon, but there was no help for it, and down it went. Wine merchant, however, came next, which was Hugh’s affair, and it rather cheered her up to see how very much alcohol seemed to have been consumed, and—oh, delightful discovery!—Hugh had not paid that for ten weeks. Greengrocer came next, and again she would have guessed that, so far from living on salmon, everybody must have taken to vegetarianism of the most expensive kind; but the butcher’s book corrected this erroneous impression. But a glimpse at the stable-book made her feel again what an economical housekeeper she was. Dear, dear, she had married a spendthrift!

A great dash of rain at the window distracted her from these sordid details, and she heard the wind bellowing up the valley, while the gutters from the last squall of solid water gurgled and guffawed and overflowed. That, too, as well as the thought of her spendthrift husband, was in her mind, and her eyes lit and her mouth smiled with an inward pleasure that she would have found it hard to explain, except that instinctively this riot and want of calculation on the part of the elements struck a note that she answered to. The sluices and the doors of heaven were open, the wind rioted, and the floods descended; the clouds poured out water, the wind raced along irrespective of the amount of useful work its stored energy might have accomplished. It all came out of the infinite reservoir of God and of life and of eternal force, and was given to her and to any who could see the point of view and understand, however feebly, however infinitesimally, the significance of its hugeness to man, the immeasureable smallness of its relation to life—to It. It was spendthrift, was it—the word had been suggested to her by the sight of the total in the stable-book, and applied to Hugh—but how could the infinite be spendthrift, when no array of figures added and multiplied could approach the plane on which the infinite moved?

And then from the thought to which the wind and the wild rain had given rise she dropped, even as a bird drops through the air, and the wings that have battled with the wind are folded, and it lies close on its nest. Hugh,—Hugh! There was her infinite, and the more she knew him the more immeasurable became that which he was to her. She had not known that such happiness was possible as the happiness that had been and was hers, which sprang from his love, and the more she devoured it, the more she wrapped herself in it, the greater grew the warmth and the abundance of it. And this transfigurement of the world, this illumination of life, was no thing of squibs and fireworks, dazzling and cracking one moment, and leaving a darkness peopled with images of the blaze the next; it was a sun burning steadily, so that all the little employments of life were uninterrupted and went on quietly and harmoniously as before, but all were bathed in its light. She still gardened; she still wrote her play, and the interest in neither was one whit diminished. She still walked on the down and looked from above the beech-wood on to her red-brick house, and, as she had done one day to him, pictured the pleasure and tranquillity of the fortunate woman who lived there. Ambrose was to her, as to Hugh, the same unholy joy, and when the other day Hugh had picked up a pebble from the road, put a neat label on it, “Ye Walls of Jericho,” and substituted it for a pebble from somewhere else on his brother-in-law’s table, she had giggled quite as sillily as he over this childish absurdity, and because Hugh had done it it was not to her any piece of inspired humour; it did not cease to be the deed of a silly boy. He was often all he should not be, he was lazy sometimes, he was extravagant, he was dreadfully tactless, but he was Hugh. And to him she was Edith, just herself.

It was just in this that the essential youth and freshness of her soul lay. Last July when Hugh proposed to her she had, unshaken by Peggy’s remonstrance, known, as the compass knows the north, where her fulfilment lay, where was the road that led to the ultimate goal. Then, too, she knew why she had struggled all those years through the briars and thickets of the youth she had called “spoiled,” why she had gone on with brave and bleeding feet, and not sat down and drank of the waters of bitterness. At the time it had seemed to her that the commonest pluck, the most average ordinary bravery had been sufficient to account for this, for when she had plucked out the thorns and sat down to rest out of sight of the waters of Marah, she thought she had her reward in the fact that it was still pleasant to see the wild flowers of the down, to feel a shuddering interest in sliced potato, and to be sincerely and humbly pleased that a little of what she had learned should be able to touch others too in the play that had stormed London. Yet this, all this, had not satisfied the spirit of her compass; it still pointed north, and then, as she said to Peggy, “Hugh came.” Then once more, and more than ever, her soul showed itself young, for though from the foundation of the world men had loved and women had loved, it was the glory of the Golden Age that she firmly believed they had recaptured. Sober, wise, and tried by suffering as she was, there was only one belief to her possible, that never had love been like this. All that had been written, all lyrical utterance, seemed to her the shadow of the light she lived in. And, such was the unalterable miracle of it all, the little incidents of life still retained their value, the garden was entrancing still, the household books—and, oh, heaven, there was Hugh already singing that last most exacting exercise of all, eleven notes up and a long note, eleven notes down and a long note, and she had still only put down “Fishmonger”! But his presence, for he was sure to come in, was not—and this still seemed extraordinary—at all distracting. It was just as natural as the sun or this glorious roaring gale; he would sit by the fire (for this chimney did not smoke), and she really would add up fishmongers and butchers.

Hugh entered, and the door banged with frightful force behind him.

“Darling, it wasn’t me,” he said; “it was the wind. What are you doing? Oh, I say, those exercises! Why shouldn’t you and I go through the ‘Lohengrin’ duet instead, which I have to sing, instead of my singing ‘La—la—’ alone? Oh, Edith why haven’t you two decent vocal chords? Or why have I? I want—I want to garden and walk, and draw out Ambrose. And I’m in a devil of a funk about the whole thing. There! And I wish I hadn’t married you, because then there would have been some point in my squalling at the opera. Now there’s none.”

Edith laid down her pen.

“Shall I explain it all over again from the beginning?” she asked.

“Oh, no, don’t bother! I know the tune. It’s ‘Men must work, and women must weep.’ But you don’t weep.”

“I know I don’t. Hughie, it’s quite disgraceful. You haven’t paid the wine-man for ten weeks.”

“Oh, but he’s not the real wine-man!” said Hugh.

He snatched another book from the table.

“Fruiterer,” he said. “Last account settled February the first!”

“I hadn’t seen that,” said Edith. “Eat as much fruit as you please, Hugh, but don’t look at my private accounts.”

“And what about the wine-man’s book?” asked Hugh.

“Oh, but it wasn’t the real one.”

Hugh had picked up another book.

“I say, do we pave the house with butter?” he asked.

“Yes. Why?”

Hugh subsided into a chair.

“Do be serious!” he said. “Peggy told me that one always had to check accounts and books if one wanted five shillings to go on with. She never has five shillings, I notice, or a purse to put them in if she had them, and I always have to pay her cabs. I’ve got all my books, haven’t I? Stable, garden, wine, men of the house. Yes. But here’s Miss Tremington’s cab from the station. I’m blowed if I’ll pay your maid’s cabs! Besides, she always looks at me as if I was a smut on her Roman nose.”

“I don’t think she takes you quite seriously,” said Edith. “And she can’t understand the master play-acting.”

“No more can the master,” said Hugh. “Tremington cab again. That’s seven shillings you owe me already.”

A long silence. Hugh, in a big chair, with its face to the fire and its back to his wife, thought he would be unobserved, and stealthily drew a cigarette from his pocket, which, under pretence of poking the fire, he lit, the tongs being used as poker, and the tongs carrying a red-hot coal. Smoking, though not actually prohibited, was strongly discouraged by Reuss, and Edith knew it. But by leaning forward he fancied he could smoke up the chimney, for the fire “drew” beautifully. Unfortunately the very perfection of the movement led to its detection, for, except for the noise of the poking of the fire, which was done with extreme violence, a silence so palpable accompanied his movements that it was clear that something was happening.

Edith only looked up for one quarter-second, and returned to her book.

“Seven and thirteen and six,” she said. “Hughie, hadn’t you better put it in the fire?”

Hugh felt singularly annoyed at the failure of his manoeuvre.

“No, I hadn’t,” he said, “and if you allude, however distantly, to my smoking again, I shall go on till lunch.”

“Very good,” said Edith, “you’ve put me out. Seven and thirteen and six——”

Hugh inhaled several long breaths of tobacco smoke in quick succession, and coughed.

“I’m sure that isn’t due to——” began Edith, when she remembered Hugh’s threat.

“Due to what?” asked Hugh.

“I don’t know,” said she. “I beg your pardon.”

“This is the Taming of the Shrew,” remarked her husband.

“Yes, dear, but do be quiet for two minutes and let me add up. Go on—warming your hands at the fire.”

There was silence for perhaps half a minute, and then Hugh threw the cigarette he had only just begun into the fire.

“Edith, you are such a kill-joy,” he said. “You completely spoiled all my pleasure in smoking, so I may just as well throw it away as not. Oh, do finish your accounts and come and talk.”

Edith finished her addition in the sketchiest manner, and drew a cheque that was certainly in excess of the total.

“There!” she said, “Berrington can pay them and give me the rest in cash.”

Hugh got out of his chair.

“Sit in that,” he said, “and I’ll sit on the rug and lean against your knees if you will let me. Oh, hang! I don’t want to go to town to-morrow, and I don’t want to stop indoors all day. Let’s go out as we did in some of those gales in the winter and get soaked and buffeted.”

A great tattoo of rain, wind-driven, rattled against the windows.

“In that?” asked Edith.

“Yes; I love being alone with you in a gale on these downs. Don’t you remember once when we were riding how your hat wouldn’t stop on, and the wind blew your hair down? And I made you shriek Brunhilde’s cry?”

Hugh threw back his head till he could see her face above him.

“You love high winds, don’t you?” he said. “I think you love everything high. Oh, dear, what a true word Dick spoke when he said that my marriage might be the making of me. I don’t say I’m made, but, oh, how true that was.”

Edith pulled his hair gently.

“Oh, don’t say such silly things,” she said. “If you could hurt me, Hugh, which you can’t, it would be by that sort of absurdity. I thought your brother-in-law was such a sensible man till you told me he said that.”

“He adores you,” went on Hugh, “and the effulgence that you shed on me almost gilds me in his eyes. But Ambrose is the true judge; he still thinks I am not wholly serious.”

Edith sighed.

“Hugh, we didn’t have a success when Daisy and Jim stayed with us, and Ambrose and—and Perpetua came up to play with them.”

“I know. Daisy beat Ambrose both in running and hop, skip and jump. And she broke his spectacles at rounders. After all, though, Ambrose got his own again: he repeated yards of Tennyson at tea.”

Edith was silent a moment.

“Daisy doesn’t like me,” she said. “She looks on me somehow as a thief. I’ve taken you away from her. She doesn’t know she thinks that, but she does.”

“Aged ten!” remarked Hugh in a tone of absolute incredulity.

“Age doesn’t matter. You can be just as jealous at ten as at eighty.”

“Probably more,” remarked Hugh parenthetically.

“Yes, probably more.”

“But she’s an absolute child,” said Hugh. “I never heard such nonsense.”

Once again the rain was flung against the windows, and this time it seemed to Edith to sound a different note, just as one night last summer the tapping of the blind had been to her imagination at one moment the beckoning of her lover, and at the next the warning of the years. It was a change like that which happened now.

“But you are more nearly her age than mine,” she said.

Once or twice during the months since their marriage the thought from which this sprang had stirred in Edith’s mind and shown its face to her. Its appearance was always momentary; it slept sound for the most part, yet just now and then, as at the present hour, it peeped out at her, quick as a lizard out of its crevice in the flowering wall and in again. Up till now, whenever the shadow of it found substance in speech, Hugh had hailed its appearance with derision, even as the birds of day mock at the absurd owl which is so out of place in the sunlight. But now he did not quite do that; he did not instinctively mock at this bird of night, which was so ridiculous, so out of keeping with the day and the sun.

“Yes, that is true, though only just true,” he said, “as the measure of years goes. I never thought of that before. How ridiculous it sounds! It just proves what I always thought that years have nothing whatever to do with essential age. Have they?”

Hugh probably did not know that he had taken this more seriously than ever before, but Edith knew it. Now for the first time, instead of laughing at her, he had troubled to give an explanation, to show her (and himself perhaps as well) that she was wrong, instead of treating her merely to a shout of derision. The question, though disposed of, had appeared to him debatable, a thing worthy of pros and cons, and at that, for one half-second, in spite of the wonderful happiness that had been hers all these months, in spite of all the completeness and content, she felt as if somewhere deep inside her there had come a touch of some pain that was new; a pain that was nothing in itself, unless it was a warning. If it was not that, it was nothing. Then simultaneously almost all her joy of love and life told her it must be nothing. There was no arrow or bolt that could touch her in the dwelling-place where Hugh and she and their love dwelt. By its very nature she knew it must be a place impregnable. And if she had wanted further assurance of that it was ready for her.

“Ah! and when shall I become ever so little fit for you?” he asked, again leaning his head back so that he could see her face. “Sometimes I seem to see you standing all radiant, all yourself, on the far side of some stream through which I have to swim to you——”

She laid her hands on his head.

“Ah, Hugh, Hugh——” she began.

“No, it is no use your protesting,” he interrupted again. “Here are you and I all alone, with this gale cutting us off from everybody else, and since you choose to talk about difference of age, I will talk about the difference of age that really matters. There you stand, I tell you—you, your mind, your soul, mein besseres Ich, and I struggle toward you, you helping me. Oh! I so long to reach you. It isn’t age that separates us, then, it is the timeless growth; it is your wisdom, your fineness I see shining above me. Who has taught me to be able to sing? Reuss, do you think? Not at all; you, Isolde. Reuss knows the difference himself, too. He told me that all he had done was but the nailing up of the fruit-trees to the wall. It is not he who made it flower and bear fruit. That was the sun’s work. You make my soul sing, and whether it sings in my voice, or sings as I sit here with you, or when I add up stable books, or dig in the garden, it is all one, and it is always singing.”

To Edith it seemed that all the love and joy of this year was gathered into his words and flamed there rose-coloured. She was thrilled and shaken and dazzled with it; it seemed that her body could not bear it, for she trembled and covered her eyes with her hands.

“Ah, stop, stop!” she said; “I am content. Leave it like that.”

She sat there for a moment in silence, and then uncovered her face again.

“You are all round me, Hugh,” she said quietly. “I am so safe.”

Again she paused a moment, and the safety of which she had spoken again seemed so impregnable that she could speak without fear of that which from time to time frightened her, that which Peggy had warned her of, that which the blind one night had tapped to her, that which just now sounded against the windows in the tattoo of the maddened rain. It had lain like a little coiled snake among flowers, but the man who loved her like that she could trust to pull back the flowers and show her, as he must, that there was no snake there, but only a phantom of hers or Peggy’s imagining. For the love that was in the word he had spoken was surely infinitely stronger than any fear.

“And yet I have doubted and wondered,” she said. “I have looked forward ten years or twenty, and seen myself so old, and you so young——”

“Then you doubted me,” said Hugh quickly.

“No, it was not that; it was myself I doubted, though I have doubted less and less, and now at this moment I don’t doubt at all. It—it will be arranged differently somehow.”

Something that had long been fluid in Hugh’s mind, suddenly crystallised.

“Was it Peggy who suggested that to you?” he asked.

“No, the suggestion came from myself, one night, the night after I told you who Andrew was.”

“But Peggy confirmed it,” asked Hugh. “She didn’t want you to marry me, I believe. I have always felt that, and wondered whether I was right or not. I am sure I am right.”

He had sat upright again, wheeling half round on the hearthrug so that he faced her, with his hands clasped round his knees, and speaking in a quick peremptory voice. Edith felt a sudden and very keen regret that this had been spoken of. For she still recalled that struggle, one-sided and foregone of conclusion though it was, when Peggy had urged her by all arguments in her power not to marry Hugh, and though the sister-love that existed between them, which was on its own level so strong and on any level so true, had put any breach between them out of the question, she did not like being reminded of that. And the thought that Hugh also knew or guessed what Peggy’s attitude had been was also a matter for regret. She made one effort to stop him.

“Ah, what does it all matter, if your heart sings?” she said.

But Hugh shook his head.

“Of course it does not matter,” he said; “but I want to know. Did not Peggy do as I say?”

“Yes, she advised me not to marry you,” she said.

Hugh frowned.

“I thought so—oh, I knew so!” he said. “Why?”

“For the reason that I doubted, dear. Because the years would leave me so old and you so young.”

Then the sister-love, so true and genuine, pulled strong.

“Hugh, I can’t bear that you should harbour this or lay it up against Peggy,” she said. “She wanted the happiness of both of us so much; of that I am absolutely convinced, but she thought we should not find it permanently together.”

Hugh gave a little impatient click of his tongue.

“I’m glad we told her that we didn’t want her,” he remarked. “Perhaps she will faintly begin to understand that we are tolerably happy.”

“Yes, I hope so. Now tell me you won’t let it make any difference to you in your feeling for her.”

Hugh shook his head.

“Can’t promise,” he said. “If a person behaves differently from what you expected, he becomes to some extent a different person. And Peggy is different from what I thought her. Oh, I have been just! Until I knew, I have honestly tried not to behave as if my guess had been true. But now that I know it is true it isn’t quite the same Peggy.”

“Ah, but it was entirely her desire for our happiness that made her try to dissuade me!” said Edith in some distress. “You must give her credit for that. Best of all, have it out with her. She will convince you—no, not that she was right—don’t be so silly!—but that she was doing the best she could. That is all that can be asked of anybody.”

Hugh’s face cleared a little.

“Yes, if an opportunity comes,” he said. “But what nonsense it all is to try to look forward ten years! How can one know what ten years will bring? And since one can’t know that, what is the value of the picture? It is purely imaginary, and probably untrue.”

Hugh looked up at his wife, then scrambled round again and took up his old place at her knee.

“Besides, please God, there will be a child, will there not,” he said, “calling you mother and me father? Why, it will be nearly nine years old then! Did Peggy put that into her picture? If we are to look forward ten years, which is silly in any case, let us people our picture with the figures we hope to find there.”

Edith leaned over him.

“Peggy couldn’t have known that a year ago,” she said.

“Exactly; so she shouldn’t have talked like that. People have no business to draw doleful pictures and scatter doleful images of thought about in the world. To imagine a thing is to help it to come true.”

Then again as he looked up at the face that bent over him the love-light leaped to his eyes.

“Besides, what more does she think could be desired than what we have?” he said. “Has not your love crowned me? And if you don’t take that crown off——”

“Ah, don’t, Hughie!” she whispered.

For one last moment she felt an impulse to look again at Peggy’s picture, and in words cold, carefully chosen words, to draw it for him, to say to him all that Peggy had said, all that her own thoughts had suggested, to show him the snake among the flowers. But the impulse passed; perhaps, as Hugh had said, it was better not to scatter doleful images. Yet something of the inevitable lacrimÆ rerum, something of the sadness inseparable from all human consciousness even when the joys of life are most vivid, were in her next words. Clothed though she was in the golden raiment of love, something still faintly twitched that mantle.

“Don’t talk of me discrowning you, even in jest,” she said. “That is a doleful image, though luckily an impossible one. But the years do pass, Hugh, there is no denying that, and one comes to the end of the chapters, and the ‘rose-scented manuscript’ has to close. That is all that Peggy meant, and in the nature of things it must close sooner for me than for you. Oh, yes, the chapters come to an end, and what a pleasant one will finish to-morrow—our winter and spring here! And I should like to tell you just once all it has been to me, to have you so much alone, all by myself, and to know that you haven’t—well, been bored. You haven’t; you have liked it enormously. I know you have been happier in these six months than ever before in your happy life. And that is my crown.”

She stroked his hair back from his forehead.

“Oh, give me many of them, Hughie!” she said. “I am greedy of love. But though this chapter is over, the next is going to be even better, if you can compare things that are perfect. Oh, how proud I am going to be of you and your voice and your acting! I can’t help that, and I don’t want to. It is all part of you, and, yes, I know I have helped, and I share in it. So let us read the dear chapters just as they come, re-reading what is past, if you like, but not sadly, not thinking it will not come again. And let us not look forward too much. Let us take things as they come to us—— There, what a long speech! If Andrew Robb had written that, Mr. Jervis would certainly have insisted on his cutting some of it.”

“But I am not Mr. Jervis,” said Hugh.

He paused a moment.

“And I could not spare any of it,” he said, “any more than I could spare any of you. Yes, darling, I agree. Let us read on together, and not, as you suggested, peep forward at the end. For who knows?”

. . . . . . . .

All day the wind and rain lasted, and though during the night the fury of its blowing abated, yet it was a gray and streaming morning when they left next day for town. The trees, battered by the wind of the day before, stood motionless in the leaden stillness, the smoke from the chimneys ascended straight and was soon lost in the thick rain-streaked air, and as their carriage drove to the gate it passed over the wreckage on the branch-bestrewn gravel. And Edith, as she leaned out to catch a last glimpse of the house, felt again the irrevocable sense of beautiful days gone, and the last of them, she thought, was the most beautiful of all and the hardest to part with. Yet they were stored and garnered within her, as imperishable as her own spirit, hidden and germinating in the inner life of her.