turf--turf more ancient than
the cathedral--in the neighbourhood of Stonehenge. And so I spent the
better part of a fortnight, greatly to the benefit I dare say of my
bodily health. I shall always love the tiny hamlets of that sun and
wind-washed countryside, between Warminster, Andover, Stockbridge, and
Salisbury. Yet always they will be associated in my mind with a bowing
down sense of loneliness, of empty, unredeemed sadness, and of
irretrievable loss. I cannot pretend that I experienced any sense of
remorse or penitence, where my abortive attempt to win another man's
bride was concerned. I had no such feeling. But, discreditable as that
fact may be, it did not make the aching sorrow that possessed me any
the less real.

I was conscious of no remorse, and yet, God knows my state of mind was
humble enough, though too sombre and despairing to be called resigned.
I believe that in the retrospect my loss seemed more, a great deal
more to me, than just a lover's loss; though upon that score alone I
was smitten to the very dust. It was rather as though, at the one
blow, I had lost my heart's desire and a fortune and a position in the
world; or, at least, that these had been snatched from my grasp in the
moment of becoming mine.

I do not think I could ever explain this to any one else; since I
suppose that in the monetary sense the rupture of my plans left me the
better off. But I, who had always been something of an outlier in the
social sense, an unplaced wanderer bearing the badge of no particular
caste, I had grown in some way to feel that marriage with Cynthia
would in this sense bring me to an anchorage, and admit me to a
definite place of my own in the complex world of London. The idea was
not wholly unreasonable. I had lived very rapidly in those few
critical weeks. Years of hope, endeavour, determination, and emotional
experience, I had crowded into my last days in Dorking. And through it
all I had been upheld and exalted by a pervasive conviction (which I
apprehend is not part of the ordinary lover's capital) that now, at
length, I was to know peace, rest, content; the calm, glad realisation
of all the vague yearnings and strivings which had spurred me to
strenuousness, to unceasing effort, all my life long.

Cynthia had been the object of my love, of my passionate adoration,
indeed. But she had also been a great deal more. When she had bowed
her beautiful head to my wooing, when she had promised that upon my