It was a sunny day of winter with a sharp breeze blowing, just after the birth of the New Year, that Howard and Maud left Windlow for Cambridge.  The weeks previous had been much clouded for Howard by doubts and anxieties and a multiplicity of small business.  Furnishing even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity involved intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things which it seemed inconceivable that anyone should need.  The very number and variety of brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage on the love of cheap beauty, so epigrammatically praised by Thucydides; he said with a groan to Maud that it was indeed true that the Nineteenth Century would stand out to all time as the period of the world’s history in which more useless things had been made than at any epoch before!

But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed to slip off from him.  They were to start in the afternoon; but at about eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the library and demanded a little walk.  Howard looked approvingly, admiringly, adoringly at his wife.  She had regained a look of health and lightness more marked than he had ever before seen in her.  Her illness had proved a rest, in spite of all the trouble she had passed through.  Some new beauty, the beauty of experience, had passed into her face without making havoc of the youthful contours and the girlish freshness, and the beautiful line of her cheek outlined upon the dark fur, with the wide-open eye above it, came upon Howard with an almost tormenting sense of loveliness, like a chord of far-off music.  He flung down his pen, and took his wife in his arms for an instant.  “Yes,” he said in answer to her look, “it’s all right, darling—­I can manage anything with you near me, looking like that—­that’s all I want!”

They went out into the garden with its frost-crisped grass and leafless shrubberies, with the high-standing down behind.  “How it blows!” said Howard: 

“’’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood: 
’Tis the old wind, in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood!’

How beautiful that is—­’the old wind, in the old anger!’—­but it isn’t true, for all that.  If one thing changes, everything changes; and the wind has got to march on, like you and me:  there’s nothing pathetic about it.  The weak thing is to want to stay as we are!”

“Oh yes,” said Maud; “one wastes pity.  I was inclined myself to be pathetic about it all yesterday, when I went up home and looked into my little old room.  The furniture and books and pictures seemed to me to reproach me with having deserted them; but, oh dear, what a fantastic, foolish, anxious little wretch I was, with all my plans for uplifting everyone!  You don’t know, dearest, you can’t know, out of what a stagnant little pool you fished me up!”

“And yet I feel,” said Howard, “as if it was you who had saved me from a sort of death—­what a charming picture! two people who can’t swim saving each other from drowning.”