and danced in the triumph
of summer like a thousand butterflies. The train had left when he got to
the station. He followed on to London, and there he lost all traces.
At midnight he began to realize that his wife could never belong to him
again.

Mr. Failing had a letter from Stockholm. It was never known what impulse
sent them there. "I am sorry about it all, but it was the only way."
The letter censured the law of England, "which obliges us to behave like
this, or else we should never get married. I shall come back to face
things: she will not come back till she is my wife. He must bring an
action soon, or else we shall try one against him. It seems all very
unconventional, but it is not really, it is only a difficult start. We
are not like you or your wife: we want to be just ordinary people, and
make the farm pay, and not be noticed all our lives."

And they were capable of living as they wanted. The class difference,
which so intrigued Mrs. Failing, meant very little to them. It was
there, but so were other things.

They both cared for work and living in the open, and for not speaking
unless they had got something to say. Their love of beauty, like their
love for each other, was not dependent on detail: it grew not from the
nerves but from the soul.

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of
the wren, And the tree toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the
running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven."

They had never read these lines, and would have thought them nonsense if
they had. They did not dissect--indeed they could not. But she, at all
events, divined that more than perfect health and perfect weather, more
than personal love, had gone to the making of those seventeen days.

"Ordinary people!" cried Mrs. Failing on hearing the letter. At that
time she was young and daring. "Why, they're divine! They're forces of
Nature! They're as ordinary as volcanoes. We all knew my brother was
disgusting, and wanted him to be blown to pieces, but we never thought
it would happen. Do look at the thing bravely, and say, as I do, that
they are guiltless in the sight of God."

"I think they are," replied her husband. "But they are not guiltless in
the sight of man."

"You conventional!" she exclaimed in disgust. "What they have done means
misery not only for themselves but for others. For your brot