“And you think I should be discouraged?” said Anthony. “It is better not to dream about failures. They generally belong to half-heartedness, so far as I can see.”
“Not all,” said Winifred softly.
They did not speak again, and she walked along the grass that bordered the path, smelling a dewy cabbage rose which he had given her, and humming under her breath one of the old version psalms. Sometimes, in the midst of all our familiar knowledge of another, there is a sudden impression cut deep into our memory. We can give no definite reason for it, but it is there, and there forever. Anthony and Winifred had walked a hundred times as they were walking then: no change had come over the old Vicarage, which stood up to their left with fluttering shadows on the grey stones, and house-martins flashing in and out under the eaves; no new charm belonged, to the bright freshness of the garden, the quiet of the day, nor indeed was he conscious of any peculiar force about the little picture which should so impress it on his mind, and yet—he never afterwards forgot it, it never faded into dull outline, or lost its delicacy of colour; there always, not to be cast out, grew into life the quaint trim hollyhocks, the busy martins, the daisies in the grass, and brown-haired Winifred walking along with a quiet grace, singing the old psalm tune, and laying the cool rose against her cheek.
Chapter Eight.
“O Life and Love! O happy throng
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free?”
Longfellow.
Mr Tregennas’s answer to the Vicar’s letter was a little unsatisfactory and perplexing. Answer, indeed, it could hardly be called, since it touched upon no subject which Mr Miles had introduced, but it contained an unexpected invitation for himself and Anthony to start at once, and pass a few days at Trenance.
Probably at no other time within the last ten years would such an invitation have been treated by the Vicar with more consideration than a hasty reply in the negative, and a speedy forgetfulness that it had been given. A man who has all his life hated change, and that uprooting of habit which even the absence of a day will effect, becomes at last a positive slave to the feeling. Nothing could be more distasteful to Mr Miles than the prospect of leaving behind him his familiar every-day life, of having the trouble of accommodating himself to new forms, and of moving, in feet, out of a world in which instinct had grown to serve him almost as well as the deliberate exercise of will. When, added to this, arose a consideration of Mr Tregennas and his uncongenial society, it was perhaps natural that on ordinary occasions he should have thrown aside the letter without so much as giving its contents a second thought.