It was an afternoon the secret of which Autumn and Spring will never tell to Winter and Summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and we should feel no surprise.

A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendor of the sun-fired woods, where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of gray stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.

When the kingfisher had left them tete-a-tete, Mr. Tristram found himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench.  He felt that he had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties which, in the language of the law, “had been imported into his case.”

Rachel sat beside him in silence.  If it could be chronicled that sympathetic sorrow for her companion’s predicament was the principal feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.

Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions.  At last he said, brokenly: 

“Can you forgive me?”

What woman, even with her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of ear-shot, ever forgets the tone her lover’s voice takes when he is in trouble?  Rachel softened instantly.

“I forgave you long ago,” she said, gently.

Something indefinable in the clear, full gaze that met his daunted him.  He stared apprehensively at her.  It seemed to him as if he were standing in cold and darkness looking in through the windows of her untroubled eyes at the warm, sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been exceeding well with him, but of which he had lost the key.

A single yellow leaf, crisped and hollowed to a fairy boat, came sailing on an imperceptible current of air to rest on Rachel’s knee.

“I was angry at first,” she said, her voice falling across the silence like another leaf.  “And then, after a time, I forgave you.  And later still, much later, I found out that you had never injured me—­that I had nothing to forgive.”

He did not understand, and as he did not understand he explained volubly—­for here he felt he was on sure ground—­that, on the contrary, she had much to forgive, that he had acted like an infernal blackguard, that men were coarse brutes, not fit to kiss a good woman’s shoe-latchet, etc., etc.  He identified his conduct with that of the whole sex, without alluding to it as that of the individual Tristram.  He made it clear that he did not claim to have behaved better than most men.

Rachel listened attentively.  “And I actually loved him,” she said to herself.

“But the divine quality of woman is her power of forgiving.  Her love raises a man, transfigures him, ennobles his whole life,” etc., etc.

“My love did not appear to have quite that effect upon you at the time,” said Rachel, regretting the words the moment they were spoken.