ead.

"Two Sundays after that I was coming down past Wiley's copse at dusk,
and heard a man's coarse laugh. There, through a tiny gap in the
nut-bushes, I saw a couple seated. He had his leg stiffly stretched out,
and his arm round the girl, who was leaning towards him; her lips were
parted, and those hare's eyes of hers were looking up into his face.
Adoration!

"I don't know what it was my duty to have done, I only know that I did
nothing, but slunk on with a lump in my throat.

"Adoration! There it was again! Hopeless! Incurable devotions to those
who cared no more for her than for a slice of suet-pudding to be eaten
hot, gulped down, forgotten, or loathed in the recollection. And there
they are, these girls, one to almost every village of this country--a
nightmare to us all. The look on her face was with me all that evening
and in my dreams.

"I know no more, for two days later I was summoned North to take up work
in a military hospital."

1917.

VIII

BUTTERCUP-NIGHT

Why is it that in some places one has such a feeling of life being, not
merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a single breathing,
glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more important a part than
the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep in the meadows, the
sycamores and ash-trees and flowers in the fields, the rocks and little
bright streams, or even than the long fleecy clouds and their
soft-shouting drivers, the winds?

True, we register these parts of being, and they--so far as we know--do
not register us; yet it is impossible to feel, in such places as I speak
of, the busy, dry, complacent sense of being all that matters, which in
general we humans have so strongly.

In these rare spots, which are always in the remote country, untouched
by the advantages of civilisation, one is conscious of an enwrapping web
or mist of spirit--is it, perhaps the glamourous and wistful wraith of
all the vanished shapes once dwelling there in such close comradeship?

It was Sunday of an early June when I first came on one such, far down
in the West country. I had walked with my knapsack twenty miles; and,
there being no room at the tiny inn of the very little village, they
directed me to a wicket gate, through which, by a path leading down a
field, I would come to a farm-house, where I might find lodging. The
moment I got into that field I felt within me a peculiar contentment,
and sat down on a rock to let the feeling grow.