I should have to come in
the winds and play round you on the sands. I should have to peep over
the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever
you went. I should have to beset you till you said, "Bother Winnie! I
wish she'd keep in heaven."'

I saw, however, that the owl's shadow had disturbed her, and I lifted
the latch of the cottage door for her. We were met by a noise so loud
that it might have come from a trombone.

'Why, what on earth is that?' I said. I could see the look of shame
break over Winifred's features as she said, 'Father.' Yes, it was the
snoring of Wynne in a drunken sleep: it filled the entire cottage.

The poor girl seemed to feel that that brutal noise had, somehow,
coarsened _her_, and she actually half shrank from me as I gave her
a kiss and left her.

Wondering how I should at such an hour get into the house without
disturbing my mother and the servants, I passed along that same road
where, as a crippled child, I had hobbled on that, bright afternoon
when love was first revealed to me. Ah, what a different love was
this which was firing my blood, and making dizzy my brain! That
child-love had softened my heart in its deep distress, and widened
my soul. This new and mighty passion in whose grasp I was, this
irresistible power that had seized and possessed my entire being,
wrought my soul in quite a different sort, concentrating and
narrowing my horizon till the human life outside the circle of our
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