ed in deep crimson flecks and pools in the polished floor,
and the shadowy panels! How I can remember going in after dark in winter
evenings and sitting there, a lonely motherless boy, and seeming to be
lost in some mysterious way to the outside world, as I pored over tales
of old romance, or when I grew older traced the origin of some quaint
custom in one of the heavy leather-bound volumes that filled the narrow
cramped bookcase of the clerk's office!

In the midst of my dreaming one thing was real to me, and I suppose it
was a part of my queer character, that what was said to be fancy in
other young men was the one fact of my life. I mean love. Apart from the
daily routine of the office, which often became mechanical, so that I
could pursue it and think of other things even while it was going on, I
had no true life in the present--that is to say no strongly conscious
life of my own, apart from the region of imagination--except when I was
sitting in the deep old escutcheoned bay-window of the Hall, looking out
upon the old shaded courtyard, where the sunlight, darting amidst the
spreading plane-trees, flecked and chequered the marble pavement, and
the little carved fountain trilled and rippled till it incited the
canary hanging in its gilded cage to break into song that drowned its
splashing murmur, and silenced the sparrows twittering about the heavy
woodwork of the old porch. That was my real world, because there was one
figure, one face, that held me to it, as though by a spell that I could
not, and never sought to break. I scarcely remember the time I did not
love her.

Mary never suspected, as I sat watching her at work, or reading to her
on those summer evenings, that my heart was ready to break out into
words of passionate entreaty. She had been so used to see me sitting
there, or to run with me round the little paved courtyard, or the old
dingy grass plot in the midst of its prim gravel walks at the side of
the hall that I had become an ordinary association of her life. I had
left school while she was still learning of a governess, who came four
times a week to teach her, for her father was a man of more
consideration than mine. But Mary was motherless as I was. Our mothers
had been dear friends in their school-girl days and afterwards; and our
fathers were old acquaintances; and so it came about that I was often at
the Hall for the week round after office hours, and that I seemed to
belong as much to the plac