He walked slowly across the lawn to his favourite seat under the apple-tree,—­and there, beneath the scented fruiting boughs, with the evening dews gathering on the grass at his feet, he tried manfully to face the problem that troubled his own inner consciousness.

“Let me brave it out!” he said—­“Let me realise and master the thoughts that seek to master me, otherwise I am no man, but merely a straw to be caught by the idle wind of an emotion.  Why should I shirk the analysis of what I feel to be true of myself?  For, after all, it is only a weakness of nature,—­a sense of regret and loss,—­ a knowledge of something I have missed in life,—­all surely pardonable if quelled in the beginning.  She,—­Maryllia Vancourt—­is only at woman,—­I am only a man.  There is more than at first seems apparent in that simple qualification ‘only’!  She, the woman, has charm, and is instinctively conscious of her power, as why should she not be?—­she has tried it, and found it no doubt in every case effectual.  I, the man, am long past the fervours and frenzies of life,—­and charm, whether it be hers or that of any other of her sex, should have, or ought to have, no effect upon me, particularly in my vocation, and with my settled habits.  If I am so easily moved as to be conscious of a certain strange glamour and fascination in this girl,—­for she is a girl to me, nay almost a child,—­that is not her fault, but mine.  As well expect the sun not to shine or a bird not to sing, as expect Maryllia Vancourt not to smile and look sweet!  Walking with her in her rose-garden, where she took me with such a pretty air of confiding grace, to show me her border of old French damask roses, I listened to her half-serious, sometimes playful talk as in a dream, and answered her kindly questions concerning some of the sick and poor in the village as best I could, though I fear I must occasionally have spoken at random.  Oh, those old French damask roses!  I have known them growing in that border for years,—­yet I never saw them as I saw them to-day,—­never looked they so darkly red and glowing!—­so large and open-hearted!  I fancy I shall smell their fragrance all my life!  ’Are they doing well, do you think?’—­she said, and the little white chin perked up from under the pink ribbon which tied her hat, and the dark blue eyes gleamed drowsily from beneath their drooping lids,—­and the lips parted, smiling—­and then—­then came the devil and tempted me!  I was no longer middle-aged John Walden, the quiet parson of a country ’cure,’—­I was a man unknown to myself,—­possessed as it were, by the ghost of a dead youth, clamouring for youthful joy!  I longed to touch that delicate little pink-and-white creature, so like a rose herself!—­I was moved by an insane desire—­yes!—­it was insane, and fortunately quite momentary,—­such impulses are not uncommon”—­and here, as he unravelled, to his own satisfaction, the tangled web of his impressions, his brow cleared, and he smiled