"Are you tired?" he asked.

They had walked about the wood, made themselves hungry, and lunched like labourers at high noon.

"No, I'm only thirsty. Do you think there's a cottage anywhere where you could get me some water?"

"Yes, there's one somewhere about. I'll try and find it if you'll sit here and rest till I come back."

She waited. He came back, but without the water. His eyes sparkled with some mysterious, irrepressible delight.

"Can't you find it?"

"Rather. I say, do come and look. There's such a pretty sight."

She rose and went with him. Up a turning in the dell, about fifty yards from their tree, a long grassy way cut sheer through a sheet of wild hyacinths. It ran as if between two twin borders of blue mist, that hemmed it in and closed it by the illusion of their approach. On either side the blue mist spread, and drifted away through the inlets of the wood, and became a rarer and rarer atmosphere, torn by the tree-trunks and the fern. The path led to a small circular clearing, a shaft that sucked the daylight down. It was as if the sunshine were being poured in one stream from a flooded sky, and danced in the dark cup earth held for it. The trees grew close and tall round the clearing. Light dripped from their leaves and streamed down their stems, turning their grey to silver. The bottom of the cup was a level floor of grass that had soaked in light till it shone like emerald. A stone cottage faced the path; so small that a laburnum brushed its roof and a may-tree laid a crimson face against the grey gable of its side. The patch of garden in front was stuffed with wall-flowers and violets. The sun lay warm on them; their breath stirred in the cup, like the rich, sweet fragrance of the wine of day.

Majendie grasped Anne's arm and led her forward.

In the middle of the green circle, under the streaming sun, cradled in warm grass, a girl baby sat laughing and fondling her naked feet. She laughed as she lay on her back and opened one folded, wrinkled foot to the sun; she laughed as she threw herself forward and beat her knees with the outspread palms of her hands; she laughed as she rocked her soft body to and fro from her rosy hips; then she stopped laughing suddenly, and began crooning to herself a delicious, unintelligible song.

"Look," said Majendie, "that's what I wanted to show you."

"Oh—oh—oh—" said Anne, and looked, and stood stock-still.

The beatitude of that adorable little figure possessed the scene. Green earth and blue sky were so much shelter and illumination to its pure and solitary joy.

"Did you ever see anything so heart-rending?" said Majendie. "That anything could be so young!"

Anne shook her head, dumb with the fascination.

As they approached again, the little creature rolled on its waist, and crawled over the grass to her feet.

"The little lamb—" said she, and stooped, and lifted it.

It turned to her, cuddling. Through the thin muslin of her bodice she could feel the pressure of its tender palms.

Majendie stood close to her and tried gently to detach and possess himself of the delicate clinging fingers. But his eyes were upon Anne's eyes. They drew her; she looked up, her eyes flashed to the meeting-point; his widened in one long penetrating gaze.

A sudden pricking pain went through her, there where the pink and flaxen thing lay sun-warm and life-warm to her breast.

At first she did not heed it. She stood hushed, attentive to the prescience that woke in her; surrendered to the secret, with desire that veiled itself to meet its unveiled destiny.

Then the veil fell.

The eyes that looked at her grew tender, and before their tenderness the veil, the veil of her desire that had hidden him from her, fell.

Her face burned, and she hid it against the child's face as it burrowed into the softness of her breast. When she would have parted the child from her, it clung.

She laughed. "Release me." And he undid the clinging arms, and took the child from her, and laid it again in the cradling grass.

"It's conceived a violent passion for you," said he.

"They always do," said she serenely.

The door of the cottage was open. The mother stood on the threshold, shading her eyes and wondering at them. She gave Anne water, hospitably, in an old china cup.

When Anne had drunk she handed the cup to her husband. He drank with his eyes fixed on her over the brim, and gave it to her again. He wondered whether she would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively fastidious). To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last drop.

They went back together to their tree. On the way he stopped to gather wild hyacinths for her. He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion of preoccupation. Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and laughed the girl's laugh that he longed to hear.

It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith's eyes, with so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly infantile emotion of his hands. It was the very same attitude which had melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart against him. She remembered Edith's words to her not two hours ago: "If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is, and how pathetic." Surely she saw.

The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her. He was sacred to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God.

She saw deeper. In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once troubled her. It was simply that his experience, his detestable experience, had had no power to harm his soul. Through it all he had preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible innocence. She said to herself: "Why should I not love him? His heart must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child."

The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered: "And it rests with you to keep him so."

He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before. He poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap. As his hands touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened. He stretched himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a happy dream. He watched the movements of her delicate fingers as they played with the tangled hyacinth bells. Her hands were wet with the thick streaming juice of the torn stalks; she stretched them out to him helplessly. He knelt before her, and spread his handkerchief on his knees, and took her hands and wiped them. She let them rest in his for a moment, and, with a low, panting cry, he bowed his head and covered them with kisses.

At his cry her lips parted. And as her soul had called to him across the spiritual ramparts, so her eyes said to him: "Come"; and he knew that with all her body and her soul she yearned to him and consented.

He held her tight by the wrists and drew her to him; and she laid her arms lightly on his neck and kissed him.

"I'm glad now," she whispered, "that Edith didn't tell me. She knew you. Oh, my dear, she knew."

And to herself she said proudly: "It rests with me."