Pondering on her words for the hundredth time, they seemed to him stranger than ever.  That any human being should admit that she was but the delight of another’s life seemed at first only extraordinary, but if one considered her words, it seemed to signify knowledge—­latent, no doubt—­that her beauty was part of the great agency.  Her words implied that she was aware of her mission.  It was her unconscious self that spoke, and it was that which gave significance to her words.

His thoughts melted into nothingness, and when he awoke from his reverie he was thinking that Nora Glynn had come into his life like a fountain, shedding living water upon it, awakening it.  And taking pleasure in the simile, he said, ’A fountain better than anything else expresses this natural woman,’ controlled, no doubt, by a law, but one hidden from him.  ’A fountain springs out of earth into air; it sings a tune that cannot be caught and written down in notes; the rising and falling water is full of iridescent colour, and to the wilting roses the fountain must seem not a natural thing, but a spirit, and I too think of her as a spirit.’  And his thoughts falling away again he became vaguely but intensely conscious of all the beauty and grace and the enchantment of the senses that appeared to him in the name of Nora Glynn.

At that moment Catherine came into the room.  ‘No, not now,’ he said; and he went into the garden and through the wicket at the other end, thinking tenderly how he had gone out last year on a day just like the present day, trying to keep thoughts of her out of his mind.

The same fifteenth of May!  But last year the sky was low and full of cotton-like clouds; and he remembered how the lake warbled about the smooth limestone shingle, and how the ducks talked in the reeds, how the reeds themselves seemed to be talking.  This year the clouds lifted; there was more blue in the sky, less mist upon the water, and it was this day last year that sorrow began to lap about his heart like soft lakewater.  He thought then that he was grieving deeply, but since last year he had learned all that a man could know of grief.  For last year he was able to take an interest in the spring, to watch for the hawthorn-bloom; but this year he did not trouble to look their way.  What matter whether they bloomed a week earlier or a week later?  As a matter of fact they were late, the frost having thrown them back, and there would be no flowers till June.  How beautifully the tasselled branches of the larches swayed, throwing shadows on the long May grass!  ’And they are not less beautiful this year, though they are less interesting to me,’ he said.