"Never mind, John;" and stooping over him, she gave him one of her quiet, soft kisses, precious now she was an old woman as they had been in the days of her bloom. "Never mind. Once there were only our two selves—now there will be only our two selves again. We shall be very happy. We only need one another."
"Only one another, my darling."
This last word, and the manner of his saying it, I can hear if I listen in silence, clear as if yet I heard its sound. This last sight—of them sitting under the ash-tree, the sun making still whiter Ursula's white shawl, brightening the marriage ring on her bare hand, and throwing, instead of silver, some of their boyish gold colour into the edges of John's curls—this picture I see with my shut eyes, vivid as yesterday.
I sat for some time in my room—then John came to fetch me for our customary walk along his favourite "terrace" on the Flat. He rarely liked to miss it—he said the day hardly seemed complete or perfect unless one had seen the sun set. Thus, almost every evening, we used to spend an hour or more, pacing up and down, or sitting in that little hollow under the brow of the Flat, where, as from the topmost seat of a natural amphitheatre, one could see Rose Cottage and the old well-head where the cattle drank; our own green garden-gate, the dark mass of the beech-wood, and far away beyond that Nunneley Hill, where the sun went down.
There, having walked somewhat less time than usual, for the evening was warm and it had been a fatiguing day, John and I sat down together. We talked a little, ramblingly—chiefly of Longfield—how I was to have my old room again—and how a new nursery was to be planned for the grandchildren.
"We can't get out of the way of children, I see clearly," he said, laughing. "We shall have Longfield just as full as ever it was, all summer time. But in winter we'll be quiet, and sit by the chimney-corner, and plunge into my dusty desert of books—eh, Phineas? You shall help me to make notes for those lectures I have intended giving at Norton Bury, these ten years past. And we'll rub up our old Latin, and dip into modern poetry—great rubbish, I fear! Nobody like our old friend Will of Avon, or even your namesake, worthy Phineas Fletcher."
I reminded him of the "Shepherd's life and fate," which he always liked so much, and used to say was his ideal of peaceful happiness.
"Well, and I think so still. 'Keep true to the dreams of thy youth,' saith the old German; I have not been false to mine. I have had a happy life, thank God; ay, and what few men can say, it has been the very sort of happiness I myself would have chosen. I think most lives, if, while faithfully doing our little best, day by day, we were content to leave their thread in wiser hands than ours, would thus weave themselves out; until, looked back upon as a whole, they would seem as bright a web as mine."
He sat, talking thus, resting his chin on his hands—his eyes, calm and sweet, looking out westward—where the sun was about an hour from the horizon.
"Do you remember how we used to lie on the grass in your father's garden, and how we never could catch the sunset except in fragments between the abbey trees! I wonder if they keep the yew hedge clipped as round as ever."