l dawn, and thrashed it all out over and over again. And yet, in
spite of everything, I can't find it in my heart to be sorry that I
came to Four Winds. It seems to me that, bad as everything is, it
would be still worse never to have known Leslie. It's burning, searing
pain to love her and leave her--but not to have loved her is
unthinkable. I suppose all this sounds very crazy--all these terrible
emotions always do sound foolish when we put them into our inadequate
words. They are not meant to be spoken--only felt and endured. I
shouldn't have spoken--but it has helped--some. At least, it has given
me strength to go away respectably tomorrow morning, without making a
scene. You'll write me now and then, won't you, Mrs. Blythe, and give
me what news there is to give of her?"

"Yes," said Anne. "Oh, I'm so sorry you are going--we'll miss you
so--we've all been such friends! If it were not for this you could
come back other summers. Perhaps, even yet--by-and-by--when you've
forgotten, perhaps--"

"I shall never forget--and I shall never come back to Four Winds," said
Owen briefly.

Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was
lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the
poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune--some broken dream of
old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them
against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky,
which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin
loveliness.

"Isn't that beautiful?" said Owen, pointing to it with the air of a man
who puts a certain conversation behind him.

"It's so beautiful that it hurts me," said Anne softly. "Perfect
things like that always did hurt me--I remember I called it 'the queer
ache' when I was a child. What is the reason that pain like this seems
inseparable from perfection? Is it the pain of finality--when we
realise that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression?"

"Perhaps," said Owen dreamily, "it is the prisoned infinite in us
calling out to its kindred infinite as expressed in that visible
perfection."

"You seem to have a cold in the head. Better rub some tallow on your
nose when you go to bed," said Miss Cornelia, who had come in through
the little gate between the firs in time to catch Owen's last remark.
Miss Cornelia liked Owen; but it was a matter of principle with her to
visit any "high-falutin" language from a man wi