over what in a more elaborate country-place, would have been called a lawn,—­an uneven plot of grass of ridges and hollows that ran down to the orchard.  Nancy’s eyes would meet mine across the little table, and often our gaze would wander over the pastures below, lucent green in the level evening light, to the darkening woods beyond, gilt-tipped in the setting sun.  There were fields of ripening yellow grain, of lusty young corn that grew almost as we watched it:  the warm winds of evening were heavy with the acrid odours of fecundity.  Fecundity!  In that lay the elusive yet insistent charm of that country; and Nancy’s, of course, was the transforming touch that made it paradise.  It was thus, in the country, I suggested that we should spend the rest of our existence.  What was the use of amassing money, when happiness was to be had so simply?

“How long do you think you could stand it?” she asked, as she handed me a plate of blackberries.

“Forever, with the right woman,” I announced.

“How long could the woman stand it?"....  She humoured, smilingly, my crystal-gazing into our future, as though she had not the heart to deprive me of the pleasure.

“I simply can’t believe in it, Hugh,” she said when I pressed her for an answer.

“Why not?”

“I suppose it’s because I believe in continuity, I haven’t the romantic temperament,—­I always see the angel with the flaming sword.  It isn’t that I want to see him.”

“But we shall redeem ourselves,” I said.  “It won’t be curiosity and idleness.  We are not just taking this thing, and expecting to give nothing for it in return.”

“What can we give that is worth it?” she exclaimed, with one of her revealing flashes.

“We won’t take it lightly, but seriously,” I told her.  “We shall find something to give, and that something will spring naturally out of our love.  We’ll read together, and think and plan together.”

“Oh, Hugh, you are incorrigible,” was all she said.

The male tendency in me was forever strained to solve her, to deduce from her conversation and conduct a body of consistent law.  The effort was useless.  Here was a realm, that of Nancy’s soul, in which there was apparently no such thing as relevancy.  In the twilight, after dinner, we often walked through the orchard to a grassy bank beside the little stream, where we would sit and watch the dying glow in the sky.  After a rain its swollen waters were turbid, opaque yellow-red with the clay of the hills; at other times it ran smoothly, temperately, almost clear between the pasture grasses and wild flowers.  Nancy declared that it reminded her of me.  We sat there, into the lush, warm nights, and the moon shone down on us, or again through long silences we searched the bewildering, starry chart of the heavens, with the undertones of the night-chorus of the fields in our ears.  Sometimes she let my head rest upon her knee; but when, throbbing at her touch, with the life-force