The Squire was wise enough not to embitter my position by attempting to alter my resolution. He had meant what he said at our former interview, and remembered it too. It was too late for him to retract now, even if he had been tempted to do so from a false regard for his daughter’s happiness.

The walk with Marion, to which I had looked forward with something of dread, was made almost a happiness by her quiet fortitude. I need not, I found, have steeled my heart and strengthened my mind with arguments for leaving her. She was not the woman to make of my sorrow a burden heavier still to bear. She might have told her love in the words of which quotation has made a platitude:—

“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.”

Not by so much as a suggestion would she have made the path before me more difficult. She had realised, almost before I had told her my intention, that not only my honour, but even my very love for her, necessitated our parting. Only, instead of the parting almost without hope as I had pictured it, she made of it a parting that had in it sure promise that we should meet again.

We knew each other’s love too well by now for need of speech. Our walk was almost a silent one, except for the words with which she ever and again encouraged my despondency, and directed it, by her own strong confidence, towards the hopefulness she was determined I should share.

Instinctively, and without acknowledged purpose, our steps led us to a spot that we had visited again and again in the earlier part of the summer that was gone.

It was a miniature forest, embedded in a sheltered valley that lay beyond the outskirts of the village between the elbows of two mighty hills. Protected by these watchful guardians, it was safe from the withering gales that swept up from the Atlantic. When all the surrounding trees stood bare and blighted by recurrent storms, Nature, in this quiet nook, was permitted to fulfil her perfect work, changing her garb, as month by month passed on, from emerald to sober green, but always keeping her brightest tints to weave her funeral robe, folding it at last upon her bosom with the air of one who has lived her life and done her work, and now falls peacefully to sleep in painless, restful weariness.

It was one of those perfect days in latest autumn that seem intended to give us, just once or twice in the year, and especially before it leaves us, an idea of all the glorious adornments Nature has in her keeping. Perhaps the brightest beds in a nobleman’s parterre might suggest the colouring. But the stiff arrangement and orderly rows of bloom are the very antipodes of Nature’s handiwork. A flush of crimson mountain-ash, thrusting itself in irregular patches between groups of dusky pines, and these in their turn lost among beeches of burnished gold, with oak and hornbeam and ash to give the softer intermediate tones is, at best, a poverty-stricken catalogue of the colours that flamed all round us on that autumn day. No marvel that to a dweller by our storm-swept seas, when a gale in August will wither all the rest of our foliage two months before it falls, the scene I am describing should be the one we chose to close around our parting.

It was in the depths of this fairy forest that we lost ourselves—Marion and I. We met no one by the way. Nothing but the silent trees above us with their mist of tangled colours, and at our feet a maze of undergrowth only just less brilliant in colouring than the tree-tops overhead, with an occasional squirrel or blackbird or thrush to suggest the life with which the scene had palpitated in the sweltering summer heat. Even the voices of the birds were silent. They would only have marred the peaceful stillness of that wondrous day. Till the early autumn evening began to close about us, and it was time to set our faces homewards.

And after we had left the forest we turned aside through a bye-lane of the village to mount once more the Chapel hill, feeling, both of us, that the spot which had seen the consecration of our love would be the fitting witness of its untimely end. And there we said good-bye. “I shall never marry, Harold,” Marion said, “till you come back again to claim me. For come again you surely will. And never think I blame you for this parting. In honour you could not have done otherwise than leave me now. And hard as it is, dear, for us to part so soon, my love (if that be possible) is only made the stronger by the parting.”

And so she left me—with none of the prayers and protests that would only have made my duty harder for me. With nothing but a confident hope, in which I could not bring myself as yet to share, that time in its course would smooth away all difficulties in the fulfilment of our love.

“When that day comes,” and these were her last words, “we will meet once more, Harold, in this same place, and dedicate anew the love which chances like this will have been powerless to change.”

The next day we parted: I on my visit to Eric in London, and she to a relative in the Midlands, with whom she was to stay during the month I should remain at Fleetwater.