looked up at him, nodded vehemently, and her upper teeth gleamed
again in that swift, brilliant smile.

Three days later he went back to London, travelling with the Hallidays.
He had not written to the farm. What was there he could say?

On the last day of April in the following year he and Stella were
married....

Such were Ashurst's memories, sitting against the wall among the gorse,
on his silver-wedding day. At this very spot, where he had laid out the
lunch, Megan must have stood outlined against the sky when he had first
caught sight of her. Of all queer coincidences! And there moved in him a
longing to go down and see again the farm and the orchard, and the meadow
of the gipsy bogle. It would not take long; Stella would be an hour yet,
perhaps.

How well he remembered it all--the little crowning group of pine trees,
the steep-up grass hill behind! He paused at the farm gate. The low
stone house, the yew-tree porch, the flowering currants--not changed a
bit; even the old green chair was out there on the grass under the
window, where he had reached up to her that night to take the key. Then
he turned down the lane, and stood leaning on the orchard gate-grey
skeleton of a gate, as then. A black pig even was wandering in there
among the trees. Was it true that twenty-six years had passed, or had he
dreamed and awakened to find Megan waiting for him by the big apple tree?
Unconsciously he put up his hand to his grizzled beard and brought
himself back to reality. Opening the gate, he made his way down through
the docks and nettles till he came to the edge, and the old apple tree
itself. Unchanged! A little more of the greygreen lichen, a dead branch
or two, and for the rest it might have been only last night that he had
embraced that mossy trunk after Megan's flight and inhaled its woody
savour, while above his head the moonlit blossom had seemed to breathe
and live. In that early spring a few buds were showing already; the
blackbirds shouting their songs, a cuckoo calling, the sunlight bright
and warm. Incredibly the same-the chattering trout-stream, the narrow
pool he had lain in every morning, splashing the water over his flanks
and chest; and out there in the wild meadow the beech clump and the stone
where the gipsy bogie was supposed to sit. And an ache for lost youth, a
hankering, a sense of wasted love and sweetness, gripped Ashurst by the
throat. Surely, on this earth of such wild beauty, one wa