"Are you really as happy as all that? I didn't know any human being could be; I didn't think it possible to conscious intelligence. That's why I never quite grasped the perfect happiness of the angels—unless they're all grown-up children. Nobody who has trodden this poor, sad old world will ever be quite happy again even in heaven. To have been a man or woman once is to know the shadow of sorrow for all eternity."
But he was thinking of her question, and heard no more. It came like a seed—like some air-borne, invisible, flying spore of the wild fern—touched his heart, found food there, and promised to rise by alternative generation to an unrest of like pattern with the mother-plant in Honor's own heart.
"You're not as happy as I am then?" he asked, with a sudden concern in his voice. "D'you mean that? You must mean it, for you wonder at the height of my happiness, as though it was beyond your dreams."
"I'm very, very happy indeed, dear one—happier than I thought I could be, Myles—happier by far than I deserve to be."
But the seed was sown, and he grew silent. In his egotism the possibility of any ill at the root of his new world, of a worm in the bud of his opening rose, had never struck him. His eyes had roamed around the horizons of life; now there fell a little shadow upon him from a cloud clean overhead. He banished it resolutely and laughed at himself. Yet from that time forward it occasionally reappeared. Henceforth unconsciously he forgot somewhat his own prosperity of mind in attempting to perfect Honor's. He laboured like a giant to bring her measure of full peace. Her days of light and laughter were his also; while when transitory emotions brought a chill to her manner, a cloud to her eyes, he similarly suffered. The wide distinctions in their nature he neither allowed for nor appreciated. Concerning women he knew nothing save this one, and all the obvious, radical differences of essence and nature, he explained to himself as necessary differences of sex.
Man and wife proceeded together homeward, and Honor, acutely conscious of having raised a ripple upon the smooth sea of his content, entered with vigour into her husband's conversation, chimed with his enthusiasm, and plucked seeds and berries that he might name them. Without after-showing of the bitter she had set to his lips, Myles serenely returned to the hedgerow harvests; and so they passed downward together towards the farm, while the sky darkened and pavilions of the coming rain loomed large and larger.
"Just in time," said the man. "I heard Teign's cry this morning; but bad weather is not going to last, I think."
Yet the day closed in drearily, after set of sun. The wind fell at that hour and backed south of west; the mist increased and merged into the density of rain; the rain smothered up the gloaming with a steady, persistent downpour.
CHAPTER II.
CHERRY GREPE'S SINS