stood open as though we were certainly expected. It was the
simplest little place, just a pair of rooms very roughly and plainly
furnished. And there we embraced with tears of joy.

XXIX

The time that I spent in the valley home with Cynthia is the most
difficult to describe of all my wanderings; because, indeed, there is
nothing to describe. We were always together. Sometimes we wandered high
up among the woods, and came out on the bleak mountain-heads. Sometimes
we sat within and talked; and by a curious provision there were
phenomena there that were more like changes of weather, and interchange
of day and night, than at any other place in the heavenly country.
Sometimes the whole valley would be shrouded with mists, sometimes it
would be grey and overcast, sometimes the light was clear and radiant,
but through it all there beat a pulse of light and darkness; and I do
not know which was the more desirable--the hours when we walked in the
forests, with the wind moving softly in the leaves overhead like a
falling sea, or those calm and silent nights when we seemed to sleep and
dream, or when, if I waked, I could hear Cynthia's breath coming and
going evenly as the breath of a tired child. It seemed like the essence
of human passion, the end that lovers desire, and discern faintly behind
and beyond the accidents of sense and contact, like the sounding of a
sweet chord, without satiety or fever of the sense.

I learnt many strange and beautiful secrets of the human heart in those
days: what the dreams of womanhood are--how wholly different from the
dreams of man, in which there is always a combative element. The soul of
Cynthia was like a silent cleft among the hills, which waits, in its own
still content, until the horn of the shepherd winds the notes of a chord
in the valley below; and then the cleft makes answer and returns an airy
echo, blending the notes into a harmony of dulcet utterance. And she
too, I doubt not, learnt something from my soul, which was eager and
inventive enough, but restless and fugitive of purpose. And then there
came a further joy to us. That which is fatherly and motherly in the
world below is not a thing that is lost in heaven; and just as the love
of man and woman can draw down and imprison a soul in a body of flesh,
so in heaven the dear intention of one soul to another brings about a
yearning, which grows day by day in intensity, for some further outlet
of love and care.

It wa