I put my hand in my pocket for my pocket-book, but I could not find it.  We had now reached a part of our road familiar enough to both of us.  Along that very path Ellen and I had walked years ago.  Under those very trees, on that very seat had we sat, and she and I were there again.  All the old confidences, confessions, tendernesses, rushed upon me.  What is there which is more potent than the recollection of past love to move us to love, and knit love with closest bonds?  Can we ever cease to love the souls who have once shared all that we know and feel?  Can we ever be indifferent to those who have our secrets, and whose secrets we hold?  As I looked at her, I remembered what she knew about me, and what I knew about her, and this simple thought so overmastered me, that I could hold out no longer.  I said to her that if she would like to rest for one moment, I might be able to find my papers.  We sat down together, and she drew up her veil to read the address which I was about to give her.  She glanced at me, as I thought, with a strange expression of excited interrogation, and something swiftly passed across her face, which warned me that I had not a moment to lose.  I took out one of my own cards, handed it to her, and said, “Here is a reference which perhaps you may know.”  She bent over it, turned to me, fixed her eyes intently and directly on mine for one moment, and then I thought she would have fallen.  My arm was around her in an instant, her head was on my shoulder, and my many wanderings were over.  It was broad, high, sunny noon, the most solitary hour of the daylight in those fields.  We were roused by the distant sound of the town clock striking twelve; we rose and went on together to Cowston by the river bank, returning late in the evening.

CHAPTER VIII—­FLAGELLUM NON APPROQUINABIT TABERNACULO TUO

I suppose that the reason why in novels the story ends with a marriage is partly that the excitement of the tale ceases then, and partly also because of a theory that marriage is an epoch, determining the career of life after it.  The epoch once announced, nothing more need be explained; everything else follows as a matter of course.  These notes of mine are autobiographical, and not a romance.  I have never known much about epochs.  I have had one or two, one specially when I first began to read and think; but after that, if I have changed, it has been slowly and imperceptibly.  My life, therefore, is totally unfitted to be the basis of fiction.  My return to Ellen, and our subsequent marriage, were only partially an epoch.  A change had come, but it was one which had long been preparing.  Ellen’s experiences had altered her position, and mine too was altered.  She had been driven into religion by trouble, and knowing nothing of criticism or philosophy, retained the old forms for her religious feeling.  But the very quickness of her emotion caused her to welcome all new and living modes of expressing it.  It is only when feeling has ceased to accompany a creed that it becomes fixed, and verbal departures from it are counted heresy.  I too cared less for argument, and it even gave me pleasure to talk in her dialect, so familiar to me, but for so many years unused.