e forest on one hot afternoon of that memorable visit to the
country, he had 'made believe' that a little companion had come to him
out of the blue mists and the green light beneath the leaves--a white
girl with long black hair, who had played with him and whispered her
secrets in his ear, as his father lay sleeping under a tree; and from
that summer afternoon, day by day, she had been beside him; she had
visited him in the wilderness of London, and even in recent years there
had come to him now and again the sense of her presence, in the midst of
the heat and turmoil of the City. The last visit he remembered well; it
was a few weeks before he married, and from the depths of some futile
task he had looked up with puzzled eyes, wondering why the close air
suddenly grew scented with green leaves, why the murmur of the trees and
the wash of the river on the reeds came to his ears; and then that
sudden rapture to which he had given a name and an individuality
possessed him utterly. He knew then how the dull flesh of man can be
like fire; and now, looking back from a new standpoint on this and
other experiences, he realized how all that was real in his life had
been unwelcomed, uncherished by him, had come to him, perhaps, in virtue
of merely negative qualities on his part. And yet, as he reflected, he
saw that there had been a chain of witnesses all through his life: again
and again voices had whispered in his ear words in a strange language
that he now recognized as his native tongue; the common street had not
been lacking in visions of the true land of his birth; and in all the
passing and repassing of the world he saw that there had been emissaries
ready to guide his feet on the way of the great journey.

A week or two after the visit of Mr. Nixon, Darnell took his annual
holiday.

There was no question of Walton-on-the-Naze, or of anything of the kind,
as he quite agreed with his wife's longing for some substantial sum put
by against the evil day. But the weather was still fine, and he lounged
away the time in his garden beneath the tree, or he sauntered out on
long aimless walks in the western purlieus of London, not unvisited by
that old sense of some great ineffable beauty, concealed by the dim and
dingy veils of grey interminable streets. Once, on a day of heavy rain
he went to the 'box-room,' and began to turn over the papers in the old
hair trunk--scraps and odds and ends of family history, some of them in
his fa