“I must go,” said Ralph, looking down into his betrothed’s face.

“Stay only a little,” said Winsome.  “It is the last time.”

So he stayed.

Strange, nervous constrictions played at “cat’s cradle” about their hearts.  Vague noises boomed and drummed in their ears, making their own words sound strange and empty, like voices heard in a dream.

“Winsome!” said Ralph.

“Ralph!” said Winsome.

“You will never for a moment forget me?” said Winsome Charteris.

“You will never for a moment forget me?” said Ralph Peden.

The mutual answer taken and given, after a long silence of soul and body in not-to-be-forgotten communion, they drew apart.

Ralph went a little way down the birch-fringed hill, but turned to look a last look.  Winsome was standing where he had left her.  Something in her attitude told of the tears steadily falling upon her summer dress.  It was enough and too much.

Ralph ran back quickly.

“I cannot go away, Winsome.  I cannot bear to leave you like this!”

Winsome looked at him and fought a good fight, like the brave girl she was.  Then she smiled through her tears with the sudden radiance of the sun upon a showery May morning when the white hawthorn is coming out.

At this a sob, dangerously deep, rending and sudden, forced itself from Ralph’s throat.  Her smile was infinitely more heart-breaking than her tears.  Ralph uttered a kind of low inarticulate roar at the sight—­being his impotent protest against his love’s pain.  Yet such moments are the ineffaceable treasures of life, had he but known it.  Many a man’s deeds follow his vows simply because his lips have tasted the salt water of love’s ocean upon the face of the beloved.

“Be brave, Winsome,” said Ralph; “it shall not be for long.”

Yet she was braver than he, had he but known it; for it is the heritage of the woman to be the stronger in the crises which inevitably wait upon love and love’s achievement.

Winsome bent to kiss, with a touch like a benediction, not his lips now but his brow, as he stood beneath her on the hill slope.

“Go,” she said; “go quickly, while I have the strength.  I will be brave.  Be thou brave also.  God be with thee!”

So Ralph turned and fled while he could.  He dared not trust himself to look till he was past the hill and some way across the moor.  Then he turned and looked back over the acres of heather which he had put between himself and his love.

Winsome still stood on the hill-top, the sun shining on her face.  In her hand was the lilac sunbonnet, making a splash of faint pure colour against the blonde whiteness of her dress.  Ralph could just catch the golden shimmer of her hair.  He knew but he could not see how it crisped and tendrilled about her brow, and how the light wind blew it into little cirrus wisps of sun-flossed gold.  The thought that for long he should see it no more was even harder than parting.  It is the hard things on this earth that are the easiest to do.  The great renunciation is easy, but it is infinitely harder to give up the sweet, responsive delight of the eye, the thought, the caress.  This also is human.  God made it.