silvery sheen trembled
with impalpable colour and the gorse everywhere was breaking into gold.
It was a day of azure, illimitable distances; of exultation and delight.
Even if one were not in love one would feel oneself a lover on such a
day.

Gregory had told himself that he would be wise; that he would go
discreetly and make sure not only that he was really in love, but that
there was in his love a basis for life. Marriage must assure and secure
his life, not disturb and disintegrate it; and a love resisted and put
aside unspoken may soon be relegated to the place of fond and transient
dream. Perhaps the little Hans Andersen heroine would settle happily
into such a dream. How little he had seen of her. But while he thus
schooled himself, while the white roads curved and beckoned and unrolled
their long ribbons, the certainties he needed of himself merged more and
more into the certainties he needed of her. And he felt his heart, in
the singing speed, lift and fly towards the beloved.

He had written to her and told her the hour of his arrival, and at a
turning he suddenly saw her standing above the road on one of the stone
stiles of the country. Dressed in white and poised against the blue,
while she kept watch for his coming, she was like a calm, far-gazing
figure-head on a ship, and the ship that bore her seemed to have soared
into sight.

She was new, yet unchanged. Her attitude, her smile, as she held up an
arresting hand to the chauffeur, filled him with delight and anxiety. It
disconcerted him to find how new she was. He felt that he spoke
confusedly to her when she came to shake his hand.

"People often lose their way in coming to see Tante," she said, and it
struck him, even in the midst of his preoccupation with her, as too
sweetly absurd that the first sentence she spoke to him should sound the
familiar chime. "They have gone mistakenly down the lane that leads to
the cliff path, that one there, or the road that leads out to the moors.
And one poor man was quite lost and never found his way to us at all. It
meant, for he had only a day or two to spend in England, that he did not
see her for another year. Tante has had signs put up since then; but
even now people can go wrong."

She mounted beside the chauffeur so that she could guide him down the
last bit of road, sitting sideways, her arm laid along the back of the
seat. From time to time she smiled at Gregory.

She was a person who accepted the unus