’No, Winifred.  Never make a pie or do a bit of cooking in my house, I charge you.’

‘Oh, why not?’ said Winifred, a shade of disappointment overspreading her face.  ‘I suppose it’s unladylike to cook.’

‘Because,’ said I,’once let me taste something made by these tanned fingers, and how could I ever afterwards eat anything made by a man-cook, conceited or modest?  I should say to that poor cook, “Where is the Winifred flavour, cook?  I don’t taste those tanned fingers here.”  And then, suppose you were to die first, Winifred, why I should have to starve, just for want of a little Winifred flavour in the pie-crust.  Now I don’t want to starve, and you sha’n’t cook.’

‘Oh, Hal, you dear, dear fellow!’ shrieked Winifred, in an ecstasy of delight at this nonsense.  Then her deep love overpowered her quite, and she said, her eyes suffused with tears, ’Henry, you can’t think how I love you.  I’m sure I couldn’t live even in heaven without you.’

Then came the shadow of a lich-owl, as it whisked past us towards the apple-trees.

’Why, you’d be obliged to live without me, Winifred, if I were still at Raxton.’

‘No,’ said she, ’I’m quite sure I couldn’t.  I should have to come in the winds and play round you on the sands.  I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you.  I should have to follow you about wherever you went.  I should have to beset you till you said, “Bother Winnie!  I wish she’d keep in heaven."’

I saw, however, that the owl’s shadow had disturbed her, and I lifted the latch of the cottage door for her.  We were met by a noise so loud that it might have come from a trombone.

‘Why, what on earth is that?’ I said.  I could see the look of shame break over Winifred’s features as she said, ‘Father.’  Yes, it was the snoring of Wynne in a drunken sleep:  it filled the entire cottage.

The poor girl seemed to feel that that brutal noise had, somehow, coarsened her, and she actually half shrank from me as I gave her a kiss and left her.

Wondering how I should at such an hour get into the house without disturbing my mother and the servants, I passed along that same road where, as a crippled child, I had hobbled on that, bright afternoon when love was first revealed to me.  Ah, what a different love was this which was firing my blood, and making dizzy my brain!  That child-love had softened my heart in its deep distress, and widened my soul.  This new and mighty passion in whose grasp I was, this irresistible power that had seized and possessed my entire being, wrought my soul in quite a different sort, concentrating and narrowing my horizon till the human life outside the circle of our love seemed far, far away, as though I were gazing through the wrong end of a telescope.  I had learned that he who truly loves is indeed born again, becomes a new and a different man.  Was it only a few short hours ago, I asked myself, that I was listening to my mother’s attack upon Winifred?  Was it this very evening that I was sitting in Dullingham Church?