love seemed far, far away, as though I were gazing through the wrong
end of a telescope. I had learned that he who truly loves is indeed
born again, becomes a new and a different man. Was it only a few
short hours ago, I asked myself, that I was listening to my mother's
attack upon Winifred? Was it this very evening that I was sitting in
Dullingham Church?

How far away in the past seemed those events! And as to my mother's
anger against Winifred, that anger and cruel scorn of class which had
concerned me so much, how insignificant now seemed this and every
other obstacle in love's path! I looked up at the moonlit sky; I
leaned upon a gate and looked across the silent fields where Winifred
and I used to gather violets in spring, hedge-roses in summer,
mushrooms in autumn, and I said, '_I_ will marry her; she shall be
mine; she _shall_ be mine, though all the powers on earth, all the
powers in the universe, should say nay.'

As I spoke I saw that lights were flashing to and fro in the windows
of the Hall. 'My poor father is dead,' I said. I turned and ran up
the road. 'Oh, that I could have seen him once again!' At the hall
door I was met by a servant, and learnt that, while I had been
love-making on the sands, a message had come from the Continent with
news of my father's death.



VI

There was no meeting Winifred on the next night.