een these gray fields, and, perhaps, she was there where
the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone now, and then went
out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone in the windows of
an old gray house, he thought. He lay back in his corner and forgot the
commercial traveler altogether. The process of visualizing Katharine
stopped short at the old gray manor-house; instinct warned him that if
he went much further with this process reality would soon force itself
in; he could not altogether neglect the figure of William Rodney. Since
the day when he had heard from Katharine's lips of her engagement, he
had refrained from investing his dream of her with the details of
real life. But the light of the late afternoon glowed green behind the
straight trees, and became a symbol of her. The light seemed to expand
his heart. She brooded over the gray fields, and was with him now in
the railway carriage, thoughtful, silent, and infinitely tender; but
the vision pressed too close, and must be dismissed, for the train
was slackening. Its abrupt jerks shook him wide awake, and he saw Mary
Datchet, a sturdy russet figure, with a dash of scarlet about it, as the
carriage slid down the platform. A tall youth who accompanied her shook
him by the hand, took his bag, and led the way without uttering one
articulate word.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost
hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of
intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary's voice
when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter
hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself at once
stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely different world, but he
did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure of it directly. They
gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of walking home across the
fields with Mary--not a shorter way, they explained, but Mary thought it
a nicer way. He decided to walk with her, being conscious, indeed,
that he got comfort from her presence. What could be the cause of her
cheerfulness, he wondered, half ironically, and half enviously, as the
pony-cart started briskly away, and the dusk swam between their eyes
and the tall form of Edward, standing up to drive, with the reins in one
hand and the whip in the other. People from the village, who had been to
the market town, were climbing into their gigs, or setting off