"They always do," said she serenely.

The door of the cottage was open. The mother stood on the threshold,
shading her eyes and wondering at them. She gave Anne water, hospitably,
in an old china cup.

When Anne had drunk she handed the cup to her husband. He drank with his
eyes fixed on her over the brim, and gave it to her again. He wondered
whether she would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively
fastidious). To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last
drop.

They went back together to their tree. On the way he stopped to gather
wild hyacinths for her. He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion
of preoccupation. Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and
laughed the girl's laugh that he longed to hear.

It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith's eyes, with
so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the
infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly
infantile emotion of his hands. It was the very same attitude which had
melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked
disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart
against him. She remembered Edith's words to her not two hours ago:
"If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is,
and how pathetic." Surely she saw.

The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her. He was sacred
to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his
stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God.

She saw deeper. In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the
significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once
troubled her. It was simply that his experience, his detestable
experience, had had no power to harm his soul. Through it all he had
preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible
innocence. She said to herself: "Why should I not love him? His heart
must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child."

The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered: "And
it rests with you to keep him so."

He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before. He
poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap. As his hands
touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened. He stretched
himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a
happy dream. He watched t