‘Yes.’ she said.

‘Why?’

’Because he is so pretty and so nimble.  I believe he could run up—­’ and then she stopped; but I knew what the complete sentence would have been.  She was going to say:  ’I believe he could run up the gangways without stopping to take breath.’

Here was a stab; but she did not notice the effect of her unfinished sentence.  Then a question came from me involuntarily.

‘Winifred,’ I said, ‘do you like him as well as you like me?’

‘Oh no,’ she said, in a tone of wonderment that such a question should be asked.

‘But I am not pretty and—­’

‘Oh, but you are!’ she said eagerly, interrupting me.

‘But,’ I said, with a choking sensation in my voice, ‘I am lame.’ and I looked at the crutches lying among the ferns beside me.

‘Ah, but I like you all the better for being lame,’ she said, nestling up to me.

‘But you like nimble boys,’ I said, ‘such as Frank.’

She looked puzzled.  The anomaly of liking nimble boys and crippled boys at the same time seemed to strike her.  Yet she felt it was so, though it was difficult to explain it.

‘Yes, I do like nimble boys,’ she said at last, plucking with her fingers at a blade of grass she held between her teeth.  ’But I think I like lame boys better, that is if they are—­if they are—­you.’

I gave an exclamation of delight.  But she was two years younger than I, and scarcely, I suppose, understood it.

‘He is very pretty,’ she said meditatively, ’but he has not got love-eyes like you and Snap, and I don’t think I could love any little boy so very, very much now who wasn’t lame.’

She loved me in spite of my lameness; she loved me because I was lame, so that if I had not fallen from the cliffs, if I had sustained my glorious position among the boys of Raxton and Graylingham as ‘Fighting Hal.’  I might never have won little Winifred’s love.  Here was a revelation of the mingled yarn of life, that I remember struck me even at that childish age.

I began to think I might, in spite of the undoubted crutches, resume my old place as the luckiest boy along the sands.  She loved me because I was lame!  Those who say that physical infirmity does not feminise the character have not had my experience.  No more talk for me that morning.  In such a mood as that there can be no talk.  I sat in a silent dream, save when a sweet sob of delight would come up like a bubble from the heaving waters of my soul.  I had passed into that rare and high mood when life’s afflictions are turned by love to life’s deepest, holiest joys.  I had begun early to learn and know the gamut of the affections.

’When, you leave me here and go home to Wales you will never forget me.  Winnie?’

‘Never, never!’ she said, as she helped me from the ferns which were still as wet with dew as though it had been raining.  ’I will think of you every night before I go to sleep, and always end my prayers as I did that first night after I saw you so lonely in the churchyard.’