It was almost in silence that they went through lanes still and dark, across the widespread park lawns and down the narrow road to the station. Her hand still lay against his heart. The kiss still thrilled through them both. They parted at the station. He would not risk the lessening of the day's charming impression by a railway journey. He could go to town by a later train. He put her into a crowded carriage, and murmured with the last hand pressure—
"Thank God for this one day. I shall never forget. You will never forget. This day is all our lives—all that might have been."
"I shall never forget," she said.
In point of fact, she never has forgotten. She has remembered all, even to the least light touch of his hand, the slightest change in his soft kind voice. That is why she has refused to marry the excellent solicitor who might have made her happy, and, faded and harassed, still teaches to High School girls the Euclid and Algebra which they so deeply hate to learn.
As for him, he went home in a beautiful dream, and in the morning he wrote a song about her eyes which was so good that he sent it to the Athenæum, and got two guineas for it—so that his holiday was really not altogether wasted.
THE FORCE OF HABIT
FROM her very earliest teens every man she met had fallen at her feet. Her father in paternal transports—dignified and symbolic as the adoration of the Magi, uncles in forced unwilling tribute, cousins according to their kind, even brothers, resentful of their chains yet still enslaved, lovers by the score, persons disposed to marriage by the half-dozen.