Three days later, leaving Gyp with his sister, he went back to Mildenham to start the necessary alterations in the cottages.  He had told no one he was coming, and walked up from the station on a perfect June day, bright and hot.  When he turned through the drive gate, into the beech-tree avenue, the leaf-shadows were thick on the ground, with golden gleams of the invincible sunlight thrusting their way through.  The grey boles, the vivid green leaves, those glistening sun-shafts through the shade entranced him, coming from the dusty road.  Down in the very middle of the avenue, a small, white figure was standing, as if looking out for him.  He heard a shrill shout.

“Oh, Grandy, you’ve come back—­you’ve come back!  What fun!”

Winton took her curls in his hand, and, looking into her face, said: 

“Well, my gipsy-bird, will you give me one of these?”

Little Gyp looked at him with flying eyes, and, hugging his legs, answered furiously: 

“Yes; because I love you.  Pull!” “Yes; because I love you.  Pull!”

The end.

VILLA RUBEIN

Contents:  Villa Rubein A Man of Devon A Knight Salvation of a Forsyte The Silence

VILLA RUBEIN

PREFACE

Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art.  And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this doubting phrase “Could we recapture the zest of that old time?”

I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means of aesthetic achievement.  We have discovered, perhaps with a certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he sets before the few who will pause to look at it.  And so—­the rest is silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged muteness which is the lot of advancing years.

Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth.  Truth, though essentially relative, like Einstein’s theory, will never lose its ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole which is the very condition of life itself.  And the task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.