At first she did not heed it.  She stood hushed, attentive to the prescience that woke in her; surrendered to the secret, with desire that veiled itself to meet its unveiled destiny.

Then the veil fell.

The eyes that looked at her grew tender, and before their tenderness the veil, the veil of her desire that had hidden him from her, fell.

Her face burned, and she hid it against the child’s face as it burrowed into the softness of her breast.  When she would have parted the child from her, it clung.

She laughed.  “Release me.”  And he undid the clinging arms, and took the child from her, and laid it again in the cradling grass.

“It’s conceived a violent passion for you,” said he.

“They always do,” said she serenely.

The door of the cottage was open.  The mother stood on the threshold, shading her eyes and wondering at them.  She gave Anne water, hospitably, in an old china cup.

When Anne had drunk she handed the cup to her husband.  He drank with his eyes fixed on her over the brim, and gave it to her again.  He wondered whether she would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively fastidious).  To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last drop.

They went back together to their tree.  On the way he stopped to gather wild hyacinths for her.  He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion of preoccupation.  Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and laughed the girl’s laugh that he longed to hear.

It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith’s eyes, with so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly infantile emotion of his hands.  It was the very same attitude which had melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart against him.  She remembered Edith’s words to her not two hours ago:  “If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is, and how pathetic.”  Surely she saw.

The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her.  He was sacred to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God.

She saw deeper.  In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once troubled her.  It was simply that his experience, his detestable experience, had had no power to harm his soul.  Through it all he had preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible innocence.  She said to herself:  “Why should I not love him?  His heart must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child.”

The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered:  “And it rests with you to keep him so.”