ard and Maud left Windlow for
Cambridge. The weeks previous had been much clouded for Howard by
doubts and anxieties and a multiplicity of small business. Furnishing
even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity involved
intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things which it seemed
inconceivable that anyone should need. The very number and variety of
brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage on the love of cheap
beauty, so epigrammatically praised by Thucydides; he said with a groan
to Maud that it was indeed true that the Nineteenth Century would stand
out to all time as the period of the world's history in which more
useless things had been made than at any epoch before!

But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed to
slip off from him. They were to start in the afternoon; but at about
eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the library and
demanded a little walk. Howard looked approvingly, admiringly,
adoringly at his wife. She had regained a look of health and lightness
more marked than he had ever before seen in her. Her illness had proved
a rest, in spite of all the trouble she had passed through. Some new
beauty, the beauty of experience, had passed into her face without
making havoc of the youthful contours and the girlish freshness, and
the beautiful line of her cheek outlined upon the dark fur, with the
wide-open eye above it, came upon Howard with an almost tormenting
sense of loveliness, like a chord of far-off music. He flung down his
pen, and took his wife in his arms for an instant. "Yes," he said in
answer to her look, "it's all right, darling--I can manage anything
with you near me, looking like that--that's all I want!"

They went out into the garden with its frost-crisped grass and leafless
shrubberies, with the high-standing down behind. "How it blows!" said
Howard:

"''Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind, in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood!'

How beautiful that is--'the old wind, in the old anger!'--but it isn't
true, for all that. If one thing changes, everything changes; and the
wind has got to march on, like you and me: there's nothing pathetic
about it. The weak thing is to want to stay as we are!"

"Oh yes," said Maud; "one wastes pity. I was inclined myself to be
pathetic about it all yesterday, when I went up home and looked in