The publication of his new volume—­containing the Winifred lyrics—­had served to colour these months of intolerable delay.  Even the reaction of the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really helpful.  At any rate, the long waiting was over at last.  He felt like Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.

The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his publisher’s salon.  How much older he was now than then—­and yet how much younger!  The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.

At a florist’s in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the bell jubilantly.  He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told him her mistress was not at home.  How dared the girl stare at him so impassively?  Did she not know by what appointment—­on what errand—­he had come?  Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would present himself that afternoon?

“Not at home!” he gasped.  “But when will she be home?”

“I fancy she won’t be long.  She went out an hour ago, and she has an appointment with her dressmaker at five.”

“Do you know in what direction she’d have gone?”

“Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea.”

The world suddenly grew rosy again.  “I will come back again,” he said.  Yes, a walk in this glorious air—­heathward—­would do him good.

As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall table.  Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.

Mounting the few steps, he paused idly a moment on the verge of this green “God’s-acre” to read a perpendicular slab on a wall, and his face broadened into a smile as he followed the absurdly elaborate biography of a rich, self-made merchant who had taught himself to read.  “Reader, go thou and do likewise,” was the delicious bull at the end.  As he turned away, the smile still lingering about his lips, he saw a dainty figure tripping down the stony graveyard path, and though he was somehow startled to find her still in black, there was no mistaking Mrs. Glamorys.  She ran to meet him with a glad cry, which filled his eyes with happy tears.