idly watching the fish in the shallow water of the round lake, strayed away into cool retreats, where the grass irresistibly invited to recumbency.  He threw himself down, and let his eyes dream upon the delicate blades and stalks and leafage which one so seldom regards.  If he chose to gaze further, there were fair tracts of shadowed sward, with sunny gleamings scattered where the trees were thinner, and above him the heaven of clustering leaves, here of impenetrable dark-green, there translucent-golden.  A rustling whisper, in the air and on the ground, was the only voice that came thither.

He had set himself to think of Beatrice.  He purposed writing her a long letter to-night, wherein he would do his best to make her understand the light in which the past appeared to him, and how little those memories had to do with the present and its love and its duty.  To be sure, he could not use the words of very truth.  He would much have preferred to speak with unflinching honesty, to confess that he had, even of late, often dwelt on the thought of Emily with tenderness, with something of heart-ache; but that the new love had, for all that, triumphed over the old, and would henceforth grow to perfectness.  But the character of Beatrice would not allow this; in her, feeling was too predominant over intellect; she could not recognise in this very frankness the assurance of an affection which would end by being no less than the utmost she demanded.  He had to seek for subtleties of explanation, for ingenuities of argument, which, unsatisfactory as they seemed to himself, might yet, he thought, help her to the reconciliation he knew she desired.  He was scarcely less anxious for it.  For Beatrice he would never know that limitless passion, that infinite yearning alike of spirit and of sense, which had been his love for Emily; but she was very dear to him, and with all his heart he desired to make her happiness.  He imaged her beauty and her talent with pride which made his veins warmer.  Her husband, he would be loyal to his last breath.  Community of life would establish that intimate alliance of heart and soul which every year makes more enduring.  Were they not young flesh and blood, he and she?  And could a bodiless ghost come between them, a mere voice of long-vanished time, insubstantial, unseizable, as the murmur in these chestnut-leaves?

He grew tired of the attitude which at first had been reposeful, and rose to wander further.  Someone else, it seemed, had been tempted to this quiet corner, away from the road; a woman was walking at a little distance, and reading as she walked.  The thought passed through his mind that a woman never looked more graceful than when walking with her head bent over a book.  When he looked that way again, he found that she had come much nearer, still very intent upon her reading.  She had, in truth, a comely figure, one which suggested a face of the nobler kind.  She would look up presently.