Lily said. "Don't fight your own peace, Maurice."

"Fight it--no, but I can scarcely believe in it. Lately the--it has been
so ceaseless, so poignant. Lily, I have had a fancy that you alone could
be my saviour. If it is so! Ah, but how can that be?"

She gave him a strange answer.

"Maurice," she said, "it may be so, but do not despair if the cry comes
again."

"What!" he exclaimed almost fiercely, "you--do you hear it then?"

"No, no, but it may come."

"It shall not. The silence is so beautiful."

He put his arms around her. The tears had sprung into his eyes.

"How weak I am," he said, with a fury against his own condition, "you
must despise me."

"I love you," she said.

He looked at her with a creeping astonishment.

"I wonder why," he said, slowly. "How can you love a man who has been so
miserable that he has almost ceased to be a man?"

"I love even your misery. Don't think me selfish, Maurice. But it was
your sorrow, you see, that first taught you to think of me."

He leaned from her suddenly towards the window which was open and pulled
it sharply up.

"Why do you do that?" Lily said quickly.

"One hears such noises in the air when one travels at this speed," he
answered. "With the window down one might fancy anything. I must shut
out fancy. There are voices in the wind that passes, in the rustling
woods that we rush through. I won't hear them."

The train sped on.

Their destination was an inland village set in the midst of a rolling
purple moor, isolated in a heather-clad gold of the land, distant from
the sea, distant from the murmur of modern life; a sleepy,
self-contented and serene abode of quiet women and ruminant men, living,
loving, and dying with a greater calm than often pervades our modern
life. A lazy divinity seemed to preside over the place, in spring-time
at least. Men strolled about their work as if Time waited on them, not
they on Time. The children--so Maurice thought--played more drowsily
than the children of towns. The youths were contemplative. Even the
girls often forgot to giggle as they thought of wedding rings and Sunday
love-making. Little dogs lay blinking before the low-browed doors of the
cottages, and cats reposed upon the garden walls round-eyed in sober
dreams. If Maurice sought a home of silence surely he had it here. Lily
and he put up at a small inn on the skirt of the village and facing the
rippling emptiness of the moor. Before going to bed they stepped