‘Your aunt was right,’ I said, ’as no one should know better than I. For was it not the new kind of pity shining in those eyes of yours that revealed to me a new heaven in my loneliness?  And when my brother Frank on that day in the wood stood over us in all the pride of his boyish strength, do I not remember the words you spoke?’

‘What were they?  I have quite forgotten them.’

’You said, “I don’t think I could love any one very much who was not lame."’

V

I wonder what words could render that love-dream on the dear silvered sands, with the moon overhead, the dark shadowy cliffs and the old church on one side, and the North Sea murmuring a love-chime on the other!

Suffice it to record that Winifred, with a throb in her throat (a throb that prevented her from pronouncing her n’s with the clarity that some might have desired), said ‘certumly’ again to Henry’s suit,—­’Certumly, if in a year’s time you seek me out in the mountains, and your eyes and voice show that prosperity has not spoiled you, but that you are indeed my Henry.’  And this being settled in strict accordance with her aunt’s injunctions, she never tried to disguise how happy she was, but told Henry again and again in answer to his importunate questions—­told him with her frank courage how she had loved him from the first in the old churchyard as a child—­loved him for what she called his love-eyes; told him—­ah! what did she not tell him?  I must not go on.  These things should not be written about at all but for the demands of my story.

And how soon she forgot that the betrothal was all on one side!  I could write out every word of that talk.  I remember every accent of her voice, every variation of light that came and went in her eyes, every ripple of love-laughter, every movement of her body, lissome as a greyhound’s, graceful as a bird’s.  For fully an hour it lasted.  And remember, reader, that it was on the silvered sands, every inch of which was associated with some reminiscence of childhood; it was beneath a moon smiling as fondly and brightly as she ever smiled on the domes of Venice or between the trees of Fiesole; it was by the margin of waves whose murmurs were soft and perfumed as Winifred’s own breathing’s when she slept; and remember that the girl was Winifred herself, and that the boy—­the happy boy—­had Winifred’s love.  Ah! but that last element of that hour’s bliss is just what the reader cannot realise, because he can only know Winifred through these poor words.  That is the distressing side of a task like mine.  The beloved woman here called Winifred (no phantom of an idle imagination, but more real to me and dear to me than this soul and body I call my own)—­this Winifred can only live for you, reader, through my feeble, faltering words; and yet I ask you to listen to the story of such a love as mine.

‘Winnie,’ I said, ’you have often as a child sung songs of Snowdon to me and told me of others you used to sing.  I should love to hear one of these now, with the chime of the North Sea for an accompaniment instead of the instrument you tell me your Gypsy friend used to play.  Before we go up the gangway, do sing me a verse of one of those songs.’