Day and Night Stories

re au rendez-vous.

t to each repetition of its memory. Here, in the familiar scenery of its birth, he realised with mingled pain and wonder that the subsequent years had not destroyed, but only dimmed it. The forgotten rapture flamed back with all the fierce beauty of its genesis, desire at white heat. And the shock of the abrupt discovery shattered time. Fifteen years became a negligible moment; the crow

"I promise you. You ha

ck to find you,

is actual words, then adde

told her, trying to smile. "I'll knock. You'

that her little hand went up to hold the hat on-he saw the very gesture still. He remembered that he was vehemently tempted to tear his ticket up there an

Once every three months they had exchanged the brief letter agreed upon: "I am well; I am waiting; I am happy; I am unmarried. Yours--." For his youthful wisdom had insisted that no "man" had the right to keep "any woman" too long waiting; and she, thinking that letter brave a

him betrayed itself. He realised it abruptly, a sense of shame and horror in him. The discovery was made unconsciously-it disclosed itself. He was reading her letter as a labourer on a Californian fruit farm: "Funny she doesn't marry-some one else!" he heard himself say.

s word. There was this fine, stupid, selfish obstinacy in his character. In any case, she would misunderstand and think he wanted to set free-himself. "Besides-I'm still-awfully fond of her," he asserted. And it was true; only the lov

cheaply than of old. The wandering instinct, too, had caught him, slowly killing the domestic impulse; he lost his desire for a settled place of abode, the desire for children of his own, lost the desire to marry at all. Also-he reminded himself with a smile-he had lost other things: the ex

en long buffeting years was no small achievement; better men had succumbed in half the time. Yet something in him still held fast to the girl as with a band of steel that would not let her go entirely. Occasionally there came strong reversions, when he ached with longing, yearning, hope; when he loved her again; remembered passionately each detail of the far-off courtship days in the forbidden rectory

, where the marvel of first love had come to both; three short miles between him and the little white garden gate of which at t

and-keep his word. He had written from Mexico a week before he sailed; he had made careful, even accurate calculations: "In the dusk, on the sixteenth of September, I shall come and knock," he added to the usual sentences. Th

the train. He met it in the face. It took him prisoner. The familiar trees and hedges, the unchanged countryside, the "field-smells known in infancy," all these, with something subtly added to them, rolled back the passion of his youth upon him in a flood. No longer was he bound upon what he deemed, perhaps, an act of honourable duty; it was love that drove him, as it drove him fifteen years before. And it dr

them, those occasional reversions when he had felt he "loved her again." Had he not, after all, deceived himself? Had she ever really "faded" at all? Had he not felt he ough

e did not stop to analyse the strange result. He knew certain things, and cared to know no others: that his heart was leaping, his blood running with the heat of twenty, that joy recaptured him, that

her in his mind, had found him, if not cold, at least without keen response. All that was forgotten as though it had not been. The steadfast thing in him, this strong holding to a promise which had never wilted, ousted the recollection of fading and decay that, whatever caused them, ce

en dislocating, fundamental in a sense he could not estimate-shock. Yet he took no count of anything but the one mastering desire to get to her as soon as possible, knock at the small, white garden gat

faculties, rose also a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies the twilight of an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is

the maid's face with a question about flowers. Were there flowers to be had in the village anywhere? What kind of flowers? "Oh, a bouquet or a"-he hesitated, searching for a word that tried to present itself, yet was not the word he wanted to make use of-"or a wreath-of some sort?" he finished. He took the very word he did not want to take. In several things he did and said, this hesitancy and mis

r he looked well or ill, tidy or untidy. He forgot that when his cap was off the absence of thick, accustomed hair must alter him considerably, forgot also that two fingers were missing from one hand, the right hand, the hand that she would presently clasp. Nor did it occur to him that he wore glasses, which must change his expression and add to the appearance of the years he bore. None of these obvious and natural things seemed to come into his thoughts at all. He was in a hurry to be off. He did not think. But, though his mind may not have noted

t gaily and impetuously along the winding lane. Charged to the brim with a sweet picture of a small, white garden gate, the l

, merely lay concealed; they waited. Thus, perhaps, does vital emotion, overlong restrained, denied, indeed, of its blossoming alt

s rising through the thickening air beyond; they nodded, peered, and whispered; sometimes they almost sang. And each added to his inner happiness; each brought its sweet and precious contribution, and built it

sterday, and there the slippery plank across the stream where she looked above her shoulder to ask for his support; he saw the very bramble bushes where she scratched her hand, a-blackberrying, the day before ... and, finally, the weather-stained signpost, "To the Rectory." It p

Farmer Sparrow's bull; he even felt in the misty air for the little hand that he might take and lead her into safety. The thought of her drew him on with such irresistible anticipation that it seem

s expecting him, indeed, but it was more than expectation; there was calling in it-she summoned him. Her thought and longing reached him along that old, invisible track love builds so easily between true, faithful hearts. All the forces of her being, her very voice, came towards him through the deepening autumn twilight. He had not noticed the curious physical restoration in his hand, but he was

t him-dead leaves and mossy earth and ferns and dock leaves, bringing the bewildering currents of strong emotion in him all together as in a rising wave. He saw, then, the crumbling wall, the cedars topping it with spreading branches, the chimneys of the rectory. On his right bulked the outline of the old, grey church; the twisted, anc

e was a roaring in his mind, and yet a marvellous silence-just behind it. Then the roar of emotion died away.

In his wild, half violent impatience, however, he stumbled. That roaring, too, confused him. He fell forward, it seemed, for twilight had merged in darkness, and he misjudged the steps, the distances he yet knew so well. For a moment, certainly, he lay at full length upon the uneven ground against the w

still and waited with him. But there was no delay. Her answe

nstantly that he might see her. Speech could follow, but sight came surely first! There was this lightning-flash of disappointment in him. Ah, she was lengthening out the marvellous moment, as often and often she had done

"I have come back to find you!" And as he said i

swer froze

nnot

ice was strange; in it was faintness, distance-as well as depth. I

; there was no power in it. Something appalling struck him between the

ready seemed increasing; he was conscious

t come in to me. I'm he

it till the skin of his knuckles was torn and bleeding-the first two fingers of a hand already mutilated. He remembers the torn and broken skin, for he noticed in the gloom that stains upon the gate bore witness to his violence; it was not till afterwards that he remembered the other fact-that the hand had already suffered mutilation, long, long y

iphered it in the gloom, he never knew. The lettering was deeply cut. Perhaps he traced it with his fingers; his right hand certainly lay stretched upon it. He made out a name, a date, a broken verse from the Bible, and the words, "

decipher the lettering in the growing twilight. Beside him, still fingering a shilling, stood the serving-girl; her other hand held a brown tray with a running dog painted upon its dented surfa

family grave.?..." Then, seeing that her customer was too absorbed in the time-table to listen

The autumn mist was rising. He looked along the winding road that melted away into the distance, then slowly tu