Andy came there to search for nearer dreams of Elizabeth. Elizabeth as she had been in her youth and gracious kindness only a few hours before. Elizabeth as she might be when they were married. And he found instead the most clear and vivid memory of a man he had never seen. He never thought much of the old Vicar, for what he had heard of him in no way appealed to the imagination. And yet now he suddenly remembered the years his predecessor had spent between these walls, and that he must, too, have been young when he came—young and full of life and hope.
It was, truly, as if the old Vicar held out a hand in that still, dimly-lighted room, claiming recognition, and the new Vicar gave it in a half-spoken—
“Poor old chap! I’d forgotten he planted the rose trees and the holly hedge. He must have liked the garden.”
Then Andy went to bed, but he was restless and could not sleep, for now the dreams of Elizabeth that he went to look for in the dining-room pressed so close around him that he remained vividly awake.
He could not have told next morning what those confused dreams were—no one, not even a young man can describe the dreams of a young man about the girl he hopes to marry. They are like the City of Married Love itself, that has spires soaring into a clear heaven and little dim places where a man may hide. And one tells of the spires and another of the dark, but no one of the whole; for the poet and realist and true lover all combined who can write about those dreams as they are, has yet to be born.
And married love—that Enchanted Muddle—is different from any other love.
For love without marriage has also the dark places and the spires pointing upwards, but it has no battlements—and battlements keep in and keep out many things.
Andy got up in the morning, hoping to see Elizabeth, and yet almost afraid to see her, lest she should guess that he had dared to come so near to her in his dreams.
A letter lay on the breakfast-table that seemed, even when opened and read, to be of minor importance. But that is the extraordinarily interesting thing about life—you never can tell what is important and what is not.