He took his pipe from his mouth and knocked out the ashes.  As they fell on the ground so he looked at them.

“All thought is wasted time,” he declared, grimly, “all thought of the past.  The past is like those ashes; it is dead and finished.”

She shook her head.

“Not always,” she replied.  “Sometimes the past comes to life again.  Sometimes the bravest of us quit the fight too soon.”

He looked at her questioningly, almost fiercely.  Her words, however, seemed spoken without intent.

“So far as mine is concerned,” he pronounced, “it is finished.  There is a memorial stone laid upon it, and no resurrection is possible.”

“You cannot tell,” she answered.  “No one can tell.”

He turned back to his work almost rudely, but she stayed by his side.

“Once,” she remarked, reflectively, “I, too, went a little way into the world.  I was a school-teacher at Norwich.  I was very fond of some one there; we were engaged.  Then my mother died and I had to come back to look after father.”

He nodded.

“Well”

“We are a long way from Norwich,” she continued, quietly.  “Soon after I left, the man whom I was fond of grew lonely.  He found some one else.”

“You have forgotten him?” Tavernake asked, quickly.

“I shall never forget him,” she replied.  “That part of life is finished, but if ever my father can spare me, I shall go back to my work again.  Sometimes those work the best and accomplish the most who carry the scars of a great wound.”

She turned away to the house, and after that it seemed to him that she avoided him for a time.  At any rate, she made no further attempt to win his confidence.  Propinquity, however, was too much for both of them.  He was a lodger under her father’s roof.  It was scarcely possible for them to keep apart.  Saturdays and Sundays they walked sometimes for miles across the frost-bound marshes, in the quickening atmosphere of the darkening afternoons, when the red sun sank early behind the hills, and the twilight grew shorter every day.  They watched the sea-birds together and saw the wild duck come down to the pools; felt the glow of exercise burn their cheeks; felt, too, that common and nameless exultation engendered by their loneliness in the solitude of these beautiful empty places.  In the evenings they often read together, for Nicholls, although no drinker, never missed his hour or so at the village inn.  Tavernake, in time, began to find a sort of comfort in her calm, sexless companionship.  He knew very well that he was to her as she was to him, something human, something that filled an empty place, yet something without direct personality.  Little by little he felt the bitterness in his heart grow less.  Then a late spring —­late, at any rate, in this quaint corner of the world—­stole like some wonderful enchantment across the face of the moors and the marshes.  Yellow gorse starred