It was now far into June, and Madge and Frank extended their walks and returned later. He had come down to spend his last Sunday with the Hopgoods before starting with his father for Germany, and on the Monday they were to leave London.

Wordsworth was one of the divinities at Stoke Newington, and just before Frank visited Fenmarket that week, he had heard the Intimations of Immortality read with great fervour. Thinking that Madge would be pleased with him if she found that he knew something about that famous Ode, and being really smitten with some of the passages in it, he learnt it, and just as they were about to turn homewards one sultry evening he suddenly began to repeat it, and declaimed it to the end with much rhetorical power.

‘Bravo!’ said Madge, ‘but, of all Wordsworth’s poems, that is the one for which I believe I care the least.’

Frank’s countenance fell.

‘Oh, me! I thought it was just what would suit you.’

‘No, not particularly. There are some noble lines in it; for example—

“And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”

But the very title—Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood—is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which is in everybody’s mouth—

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;”

and still worse the vision of “that immortal sea,” and of the children who “sport upon the shore,” they convey nothing whatever to me. I find though they are much admired by the clergy of the better sort, and by certain religiously-disposed people, to whom thinking is distasteful or impossible. Because they cannot definitely believe, they fling themselves with all the more fervour upon these cloudy Wordsworthian phrases, and imagine they see something solid in the coloured fog.’

It was now growing dark and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, but in a minute or two they ceased. Frank, contrary to his usual wont, was silent. There was something undiscovered in Madge, a region which he had not visited and perhaps could not enter. She discerned in an instant what she had done, and in an instant repented. He had taken so much pains with a long piece of poetry for her sake: was not that better than agreement in a set of propositions? Scores of persons might think as she thought about the ode, who would not spend a moment in doing anything to gratify her. It was delightful also to reflect that Frank imagined she would sympathise with anything written in that temper. She recalled what she herself had said when somebody gave Clara a copy in ‘Parian’ of a Greek statue, a thing coarse in outline and vulgar. Clara was about to put it in a cupboard in the attic, but Madge had pleaded so pathetically that the donor had in a measure divined what her sister loved, and had done her best, although she had made a mistake, that finally the statue was placed on the bedroom mantelpiece. Madge’s heart overflowed, and Frank had never attracted her so powerfully as at that moment. She took his hand softly in hers.

‘Frank,’ she murmured, as she bent her head towards him, ‘it is really a lovely poem.’

Suddenly there was a flash of forked lightning at some distance, followed in a few seconds by a roll of thunder increasing in intensity until the last reverberation seemed to shake the ground. They took refuge in a little barn and sat down. Madge, who was timid and excited in a thunderstorm, closed her eyes to shield herself from the glare.

The tumult in the heavens lasted for nearly two hours and, when it was over, Madge and Frank walked homewards without speaking a word for a good part of the way.

‘I cannot, cannot go to-morrow,’ he suddenly cried, as they neared the town.

‘You shall go,’ she replied calmly.

‘But, Madge, think of me in Germany, think what my dreams and thoughts will be—you here—hundreds of miles between us.’

She had never seen him so shaken with terror.

‘You shall go; not another word.’

‘I must say something—what can I say? My God, my God, have mercy on me!’

‘Mercy! mercy!’ she repeated, half unconsciously, and then rousing herself, exclaimed, ‘You shall not say it; I will not hear; now, good-bye.’

They had come to the door; he went inside; she took his face between her hands, left one kiss on his forehead, led him back to the doorway and he heard the bolts drawn. When he recovered himself he went to the ‘Crown and Sceptre’ and tried to write a letter to her, but the words looked hateful, horrible on the paper, and they were not the words he wanted. He dared not go near the house the next morning, but as he passed it on the coach he looked at the windows. Nobody was to be seen, and that night he left England.

‘Did you hear,’ said Clara to her mother at breakfast, ‘that the lightning struck one of the elms in the avenue at Mrs Martin’s yesterday evening and splintered it to the ground?’