re. This
which he now knew, these violent passions which now he felt, but lit for
him more whitely the road his feet must take. If he had ever tried
consciously to see his life and Mabel's from Mabel's point of view, now,
when his mind threatened disloyalty to her, he must try. And would! The
old habit, the old trick of seeing the other side, acted never so
strongly upon him as when unkindness appeared to lie in his own
attitude. Unkindness was unfairness and unfairness was above all
qualities the quality he could not tolerate. And here was unfairness,
open, monstrous, dishonourable.

Mabel should not feel it.

But he was aware, he was informed as by a voice in his ears, "You have
struck your tents. You are upon the march."

II

He approached the town. The school lay in this quarter and his way ran
through its playing fields and its buildings. Nature in her moods much
fashioned his thoughts when he walked the countryside or rode his daily
journey on his bicycle. He now carried his thoughts into her mood that
stood about him.

Nature was to him in October, and not in spring, poignantly suggestive,
deeply mysterious, in her intense and visible occupation. She was
enormously busy; but she was serenely busy. She was stripping her house
of its deckings, dismantling her habitation to the last and uttermost
leaf; but she stripped, dismantled, extinguished, broke away, not in
despair, defeat, but in ordered preparation and with exquisite certitude
of glory anew. That, in October, was her voice to him, stirring
tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life
more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him of
preparation for winter, and beyond winter with ineffable assurance for
spring, bring winter what it might. He saw her dismantling all her house
solely to build her house again. She packed down. She did not pack up,
which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She packed down, which is
resolve, resistance, husbandry of power to build and burst again; and
burst again,--in stout affairs of outposts in sheltered banks and secret
nooks; in swift, amazing sallies of violet and daffodil and primrose; in
multitudinous clamour of all her buds in May; and last in her resistless
tide and flood and avalanche of beauty to triumph and possession.

That was October's voice to him; that he apprehended and tingled to it,
as the essence of its strange, heavy odours; secret of its veiling
mists;