dusty way on to the high plateau through which
was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed
to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy
country lay all round them--the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of
white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees
which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On
the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even
for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half
tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their
own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the
patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze,
there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them
poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded
happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.

One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little
dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard
the purring sound of the night-jar, and immediately after the bird
itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they
caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.

Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears
dropped on to her cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her
always smote him to the heart.

'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if
you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for
myself, but----'

For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?--of
youth, of hope, of memory?

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-coloured
waves, while he held her hand close and tenderly. No--she was not
unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone for ever out of that early joy. Her
life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things.
It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter
self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her
husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had
conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her
present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married
life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy
of the Mid