ll was
for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

When the six months had gone by, he came to claim her hand. She was
quite astonished. 'You promised to marry me at the end of six months,'
he reminded her.

'Surely it isn't six months already,' she said.

He referred her to the calendar, recalled the date of her husband's
death.

'You are strangely literal for a poet,' she said. 'Of course I _said_
six months, but six months doesn't mean twenty-six weeks by the clock.
All I meant was that a decent period must intervene. But even to myself
it seems only yesterday that poor Harold was walking beside me in the
Kurhaus Park.' She burst into tears, and in the face of them he could
not pursue the argument.

Gradually, after several interviews and letters, it was agreed that they
should wait another six months.

'She _is_ right,' he reflected again. 'We have waited so long, we may as
well wait a little longer and leave malice no handle.'

The second six months seemed to him much longer than the first. The
charm of respectful adoration had lost its novelty, and once again his
breast was racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves
even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that
shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred's reproach
of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him
exactly at the end of the twelve-month. But he was determined that she
should have no later than this exact date for at least 'naming the day'.
Not the most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny
that Mrs. Grundy's claim had been paid to the last minute.

The publication of his new volume--containing the Winifred lyrics--had
served to colour these months of intolerable delay. Even the reaction of
the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every
second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that
had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really
helpful. At any rate, the long waiting was over at last. He felt like
Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.

The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of
Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he
had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his
publisher's salon. How much older he was now than then--and yet how much
younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds