from his reverie
he was thinking that Nora Glynn had come into his life like a fountain,
shedding living water upon it, awakening it. And taking pleasure in the
simile, he said, 'A fountain better than anything else expresses this
natural woman,' controlled, no doubt, by a law, but one hidden from him.
'A fountain springs out of earth into air; it sings a tune that cannot
be caught and written down in notes; the rising and falling water is
full of iridescent colour, and to the wilting roses the fountain must
seem not a natural thing, but a spirit, and I too think of her as a
spirit.' And his thoughts falling away again he became vaguely but
intensely conscious of all the beauty and grace and the enchantment of
the senses that appeared to him in the name of Nora Glynn.

At that moment Catherine came into the room. 'No, not now,' he said; and
he went into the garden and through the wicket at the other end,
thinking tenderly how he had gone out last year on a day just like the
present day, trying to keep thoughts of her out of his mind.

The same fifteenth of May! But last year the sky was low and full of
cotton-like clouds; and he remembered how the lake warbled about the
smooth limestone shingle, and how the ducks talked in the reeds, how the
reeds themselves seemed to be talking. This year the clouds lifted;
there was more blue in the sky, less mist upon the water, and it was
this day last year that sorrow began to lap about his heart like soft
lakewater. He thought then that he was grieving deeply, but since last
year he had learned all that a man could know of grief. For last year he
was able to take an interest in the spring, to watch for the
hawthorn-bloom; but this year he did not trouble to look their way.
What matter whether they bloomed a week earlier or a week later? As a
matter of fact they were late, the frost having thrown them back, and
there would be no flowers till June. How beautifully the tasselled
branches of the larches swayed, throwing shadows on the long May grass!
'And they are not less beautiful this year, though they are less
interesting to me,' he said.

He wandered through the woods, over the country, noting the different
signs of spring, for, in spite of his sorrow, he could not but admire
the slender spring. He could not tell why, perhaps because he had always
associated Nora with the gaiety of the spring-time. She was thin like
the spring, and her laughter was blithe like the spring. She s