The morning after the storm Wentworth was sitting in the library at Barford, looking out across the garden to the down. Behind the down lay Priesthope, where Fay was.

He was thinking of her. This shewed a frightful lapse in his regulated existence. So far he had allowed the remembrance of Fay to invade him only in the evenings over his cigarette, or when he was pacing amid his purpling beeches.

Was she now actually beginning to invade his mornings, those mornings sacred to the history of Sussex? No! No! Dismiss the extravagant surmise. Wentworth was far more interested in his attitude towards a thing or person—in what he called his point of view—than in the thing viewed.

He was distinctly attracted by Fay, but he was more occupied with his feelings about her than with herself. It was these which were now engrossing him.

For some time past he had been working underground—digging out the foundations—and as a rule invisible as a mole within them—of a tedious courtship undertaken under the sustaining conviction that marriage is much more important to a woman than to a man. This point of view was not to be wondered at, for Wentworth, like many other eligible, suspiciously diffident men, had so far come into contact mainly with that large battalion of women who forage for themselves, and who take upon themselves with assiduity the work of acquaintanceship and courtship. He had never quite liked their attentions or been deceived by their "chance meetings." But his conclusions respecting the whole sex had been formed by the conduct of the female skirmishers who had thrown themselves across his path; and he, in common with many other secluded masculine violets, innocently supposed that he was irresistible to the other sex; and that when he met the right woman she would set to work like the others, only with a little more tact, and the marriage would be conveniently arrived at.

But Fay showed no signs of setting to work, no alacrity, no apparent grasp of the situation: I mean of the possible but by no means certain turn which affairs might one day take.

At first Wentworth was incredulous, but he remembered in time that one of the tactics of women is to retreat in order to lure on a further masculine advance. Then he became offended, stiff with injured dignity, almost anxious. But he communed with himself, analysed his feelings under various headings, and discovered that he was not discouraged. He was aware—at least, he told himself that he was aware—that extraordinary efforts must be made in love affairs. I don't know how he reconciled that startling theory with his other tenets, but he did. The chance suggestions of his momentary moods he regarded as convictions, and adopted them one day and disowned them the next with much naÏf dignity, and offended astonishment, if the Bishop or some other old friend actually hinted at a discrepancy between diametrically opposed but earnestly expounded views. He imagined that he was now grappling with the difficulties inherent to love in their severest form. It was of estrangements like these that poets sang. He opened his Browning and found he was on the right road, passing the proper milestones at the correct moment. He was sustained in his idleness this morning by the comfortable realisation that he was falling desperately in love. He shook his head at himself and smiled. He was not ill pleased with himself. He would return to a perfectly regulated life later on. In the meanwhile he would give a free rein to these ecstatic moods, these wild emotions. When he had given a free rein to them they ambled round a little paddock, and brought him back to his own front door. It was delicious. He had thoughts of chronicling the expedition in verse.

I fear we cannot escape the conclusion that Wentworth was on the verge of being a prig. But he was held back as it were by the coat-tails from the abyss by a certain naÏvetÉ and uprightness of character. The Bishop once said of him that he was so impressed with the fact that dolls were stuffed with sawdust that it was impossible not to be fond of him.

Wentworth in spite of his sweeping emotions was still unconsciously meditating a possible retreat as regards Fay, was still glancing furtively over his shoulder. Strange how that involuntary, self-protective attitude on a man's part is never lost on a woman, however dense she may otherwise be, almost always ends by ruining him with her. Others besides Lot's wife have become petrified by looking back.

Fay, he reflected, must make it perfectly clear to him that if he did propose he would be accepted—she in short must commit herself—and then—after all a bachelor's life had great charm. But still—at any rate he might come back from Lostford this afternoon by way of Pilgrim Road. That would tie him to nothing. She often walked there. It would be an entirely chance meeting. Wentworth had frequently used this "short cut" of late which did not add more than two miles to the length of his return journey from Lostford.

It was still early in the afternoon when he rode slowly down Pilgrim Road feeling like a Cavalier. There was no hurry. The earth was breathing again after the storm. Everything was resting, and waking in the vivid March sunshine. As he rode at a foot's pace along the mossy track dappled with anemones, as he noted the thin powder of green on the boles of the beech trees, and the intense blue through the rosy haze of myriad twigs, the slight hunger of his heart increased upon him. There was a whisper in the air which stirred him vaguely in spite of himself.

At that instant he caught sight of a slight black figure sitting on a fallen tree near the track.

For one moment the Old Adam in him actually suggested that he should ride past, just taking off his hat. But he had ridden past in life, just taking off his hat, so often that the action lacked novelty. He almost did it yet again from sheer force of habit. Then he dismounted and walked up to Fay, bridle in hand.

"What good fortune to meet you," he said. "I so seldom come this way."

This may have been the truth in some higher, rarer sense than its obvious meaning, for Wentworth was a perfectly veracious person. Yet anyone who had seen him during the last few weeks constantly riding at a foot's pace down this particular glade, looking carefully to right and left, would hardly have felt that his remark dovetailed in with the actual facts. The moral is—morals cluster like bees round certain individuals—that we must not ponder too deeply the meanings of men like Wentworth.

"I often used to come here," said Fay, "but not of late. I came to get some palm."

She had in her bare hand a little bunch of palm, the soft woolly buds on them covered with yellow dust. She held them towards Wentworth, and he looked at them with grave attention.

The cob, a privileged person, of urbane and distinguished manners, suddenly elongated towards them a mobile upper lip, his sleek head slightly on one side, his kind, sly eyes half shut.

"Conrad," said Wentworth, "we never ask. We only take what is given us."

Fay laughed, and gave them both a twig.

Wentworth drew his through his buttonhole. Conrad twisted his in his strong yellow teeth, turned it over, and then spat it out. The action, though of doubtful taste in itself, was ennobled by his perfect rendering of it. He brought it, so to speak, forever within the sphere of exquisite manners.

Wentworth led him back to the path, tied him to a tree, and then came back and sat down at a little distance from Fay on the same trunk. He had somehow nothing to say, but of course he should think of something striking directly. One of Fay's charms was that she did not talk much.

A young couple close at hand were not hampered by any doubts as to a choice of subject.

From among the roots of a clump of alder rose a sweet little noise of mouse talk, intermittent, affairÉ, accompanied by sudden rustlings and dartings under dead leaves, momentary glimpses of a tiny brown bride and bridegroom. Ah! wedded bliss! Ah! youth and sunshine, and the joy of life in a new soft silken coat!

Fay and Wentworth watched and listened, smiling at each other from time to time.

"I am forced to the conclusion," said Wentworth at last, "that even in these early days Mrs. Mouse does not listen to all Mr. Mouse says."

"How could she, poor thing, when he never leaves off talking?"

"Well, neither does she. They both talk at once. I suppose they have not our morbid craving for a listener."

"Do you think—I mean really and truly—that they are talking about themselves?" said Fay, looking at Wentworth as if any announcement of his on the subject would be considered final.

"No doubt," he said indulgently, willing to humour her, and feeling more like a cavalier than ever.

Then he actually noticed how pale she was.

"You look tired," he said. "I am afraid the storm last night kept you awake."

"Yes," she said, and hung her head.

Wentworth, momentarily released from his point of view, looked at her more closely, and perceived that her lowered eyelids were heavy with recent tears. And as he looked, he realised, by some other means than those of reasoning and deduction, by some mysterious intuitive feeling new to him, that all these weeks when he had imagined she was drawing him on by feminine arts of simulated indifference she had in reality been thinking but little of him because she was in trouble. The elaborate edifices which he had raised in solitude to account for this and that in her words one day, in her attitude towards him another day, toppled over, and he saw before him a simple creature, who for some unknown and probably foolish reason, had cried all night.

He perceived suddenly, without possibility of doubt, that she had never considered him in the light of a lover, had never thought seriously about him at all, and that what he had taken to be an experienced woman of the world was in reality an ignorant child at heart.

He felt vaguely relieved. There were evidently no ambushes, no surprises, no pitfalls in this exquisite nature. There was really nothing to withdraw from. He suddenly experienced a strong desire to go forward, a more imperative desire than he had ever known about anything before. Even as he was conscious of it Fay raised her eyes to his and it passed away again, leaving a great tranquillity behind, together with a mounting sense of personal power.

If Fay had spoken to him he had not heard what she had said. But he did not mind having missed it. The meaning of the spring was reaching him through her presence like music through a reed. He had never understood it till now. Poor empty little reed! Poor entranced listener mistaking the reed for music!

Can it be that when God made His pretty world He had certain things exceeding sharp and sweet to say to us, which it is His will only to whisper to us through human reeds: the frail human reeds on which we sometimes deafly lean until they break and pierce our cruel hands?

The mystery of the spring was becoming clear and clearer. What Wentworth had believed hitherto to be a deceptive voice was nothing but a reiterated faithful prophecy, a tender warning to him so that he might be ready when the time came.

"The primroses will soon be out," he said as if it were a secret.

"Very soon," she said, though they were out already. Fay always assented to what was said.

"I must be going," she said, getting up. "I have walked too far. If I sit here any longer I shall never get home at all."

"Let me take you home on Conrad."

Fay hesitated.

"I am frightened of horses."

"But not of Conrad. He is only an armchair stuffed to look like a horse. And I will lead him."

Fay still hesitated.

He took an authoritative tone. He must insist on her riding home. She was tired already, and it was a long mile up hill to Priesthope.

Fay acquiesced. To-day of all days she was not in a condition for anything but a dazed acceptance of events as they came.

Wentworth lifted her gently onto the saddle, and put one small dangling foot into a stirrup shortened to meet it.

She was alarmed and clutched Conrad's mane, but gradually her timidity was reassured, and they set out slowly together, Wentworth walking beside her, with his hand on the rein.

The little bunch of palm was forgotten. It had done its part.

Wentworth talked and Fay listened, or seemed to listen. Her mind wandered if Conrad pricked his ears, but he did not prick them very often.

Wentworth felt that it was time Fay made more acquaintance with his mind, and he proceeded without haste, but without undue delay to indicate to her portions of his own attitude towards life, his point of view on various subjects. All the sentiments which must infallibly have lowered him in the eyes of a shrewder woman he spread before her with childish confidence. He gave her of his best. He expressed a hope that he did not abuse for his own selfish gratification his power of entering swiftly into intimacy with his fellow creatures. He alluded to his own freedom from ambition, his devotion—unlike other men—to the small things of life, love, friendship, etc.: we know the rest. Wentworth had been struck by that sentence when he first said it to the Bishop, and he repeated it now. Fay thought it very beautiful. She proved a more sympathetic listener than the Bishop.

I don't know whether like Mrs. Mouse she did not listen to all Mr. Mouse said. But at any rate she noticed for the first time how lightly Wentworth walked, how square his shoulders were, and the beauty of his brown thin hand upon the bridle; and through her mind a little streak of vanity came back to the surface, momentarily buried under the dÉbris of last night's emotion. Wentworth was interested in her. He admired her. He did not know anything uncomfortable about her—as Magdalen did. He thought a great deal of her. It was nice to be with a person who thought highly of one. It had been a relief to meet him. How well he talked! What a wide-minded, generous man!

The gate into the gardens must have been hurrying towards them, it was reached so soon. Wentworth, after a momentary surprise at beholding it, stopped the cob, and helped Fay with extreme care to the ground. One of Fay's attractions was her appearance of great fragility. Men felt instinctively that with the least careless usage she might break in two. She must be protected, cheered, have everything made smooth for her. She was in reality much stronger than many of her taller, more robust-looking sisters, who, whether wives or spinsters, if they required assistance, had to look for it in quinine. An uneasy jealousy of Fay led Lady Blore frequently to point out that Fay was always well enough to do what she wanted. Aunt Mary's own Roman nose and stalwart figure warded off from her the sympathy to which her severe cramps undoubtedly entitled her.

"When shall I see you again?" said Wentworth, suddenly realising that the good hour was over.

Fay did not answer. She was confused. A very delicate colour flew to her cheek.

Wentworth, reddening under his tan, said: "Perhaps Pilgrim Road is a favourite walk of yours?"

"Yes. I often go there in the afternoon."

"I have to pass that way, too, most days," he said. "It is a short cut to Lostford."

He had forgotten that an hour before he had announced that he seldom used that particular path. It did not matter, for Fay had not noticed the contradiction any more than he did. Fay was easy to get on with because she never compared what anyone said one day with what they said the next. She never would feel the doubts, the perplexities that keener minds had had to fight against in dealing with him.

For the first time she looked at his receding figure with a sense of regret and loss.

Magdalen was in the house waiting to give her her tea, dear Magdalen who was so good, and so safe, such a comforter—but who knew. Fay shrank back instinctively as she neared the house, and then crept upstairs to her own room, and had tea there.

Wentworth rode home feeling younger that he had done for years. What is thirty-nine? No age for a thin man. (He was in reality nearly forty-one.) He was pleased with himself. How quaintly amusing he had been about the mouse. He regretted, not for the first time, that he did not write novels, for little incidents like that, which the conventional mind of the ordinary novelist was incapable of perceiving, would intertwine charmingly with a love scene. The small service he had rendered Fay linked itself to a wish to do something more for her—he did not know exactly what—but something larger than to-day. Any fool, any bucolic squireen, could have given her a lift home on a cob. He would like to do something which another person could not do, something which would cheer her, console her, and at the same time place him in a magnanimous light.

We all long for an opportunity to act with generosity and tenderness to the one we love. We need not trouble ourselves to seek for such an occasion, for though many things fail us in this life the opportunity so to act has never yet failed to arrive, and has never arrived alone, always hand in hand with some prosaic hideously difficult circumstance, which, if we are of an artistic temperament, may appear to us too ugly.

Wentworth had never wished to do anything for the gay little lady who, a few years ago, had crossed his path. The principal subject of his cogitations about her had been whether she would be able to adapt herself to him and his habits, to understand his many-sided wayward nature, and to add permanently to his happiness; or whether, on the contrary, she might not prove a bar to his love of solitude, a drag on his soaring spirit. So I think we may safely conclude that his feelings for her had not gone to breakneck length. But the germ in his mind of compassionate protection and instinctive desire to help Fay had in it the possibility of growth, of some expansion. And what other feeling in Wentworth's clean, well-regulated, sterilized mind had shown any power of growth?

The worst of growth is that a small acorn does not grow into a large acorn as logical persons expect. It ought to, but it does not. It grows instead into something quite unrecognisable from its small beginnings, something for which, perhaps, beyond a certain stage, there is no room,—not even a manger.

Those who love must discard much. Wentworth had not yet felt the need of discarding anything, and he had not the smallest intention of doing so. He intended instead to make a small ornamental addition, a sort of portico, to his life. His mind had got itself made up this afternoon, and he contemplated the proposed addition with some complacency as already made.

There is, I believe, a method of planting an acorn in a bottle, productive of the happiest results—for those who love small results. You only give the acorn a little water every day,—no soil of course. The poor thing will push up a thin twig of stem through the bottle neck, and in time will unfold a few real oak leaves. Men like Wentworth would always prefer the acorn to remain an acorn, but if it shews signs of growth, some of them are wise enough, take alarm early enough, to squeeze it quickly down a bottle neck before it has expanded too much to resist the passage.

Had Fate in store for Wentworth a kinder, sterner destiny than that, or would she allow him to stultify himself, to mutilate to his own convenience a great possibility?