He had meant this visit to be of three days at most; but time slipped by so pleasantly that a week was gone before he could resolve on departure.  Most of the mornings he spent in rambles alone, rediscovering many a spot in the country round which had been familiar to him as a boy, but which he had never cared to seek in his revisitings of Greystone hitherto.  One day, as he followed the windings of a sluggish stream, he saw flowers of arrowhead, white flowers with crimson centre, floating by the bank, and remembered that he had once plucked them here when on a walk with his father, who held him the while, lest he should stretch too far and fall in.  To reach them now, he lay down upon the grassy brink; and in that moment there returned to him, with exquisite vividness, the mind, the senses, of childhood; once more he knew the child’s pleasure in contact with earth, and his hand grasped hard at the sweet-smelling turf as though to keep hold upon the past thus fleetingly recovered.  It was gone —­ no doubt, for ever; a last glimpse vouchsafed to him of life’s beginning as he set his face towards the end.  Then came a thought of joy.  The keen sensations which he himself had lost were his child’s inheritance.  Somewhere in the fields, this summer morning, Hughie was delighting in the scent, the touch, of earth, young amid a world where all was new.  The stereotyped phrase about parents living again in their children became a reality and a source of deep content.  So does a man repeat the experience of the race, and with each step onward live into the meaning of some old word that he has but idly echoed.

On the day before he left, a letter reached him from Alma.  He had felt surprise at not hearing sooner from her; but Alma’s words explained the delay.

‘I have been thinking a great deal,’ she wrote, ’and I want to tell you of my thoughts.  Don’t imagine they are mere fancies, the result of ill-health.  I feel all but well again, and have a perfectly clear head.  And perhaps it is better that I should write what I have to say, instead of speaking it.  In this way I oblige you to hear me out.  I don’t mean that you are in the habit of interrupting me, but perhaps you would if I began to talk as I am going to write.

’Why can’t we stay at Pinner?

’There, that shall have a line to itself.  Take breath, and now listen again.  I dislike the thought of removing to Gunnersbury —­ really and seriously I dislike it.  You know I haven’t given you this kind of trouble before; when we left Wales I was quite willing to have stayed on if you had wished it —­ wasn’t I?  Forgive me, then, for springing this upon you after all your arrangements are made; I could not do it if I did not feel that our happiness (not mine only) is concerned.  Would it be possible to cancel your agreement with the Gunnersbury man?  If not, couldn’t you sublet, with little or no loss?  The Pinner house isn’t let yet —­ is it?  Do let us stay where we are.  I think it is the first serious request I ever made of you, and I think you will see that I have some right to make it.