ooded with high trees. The sun shone softly
on their leaves, and the bright stream was ruffled by a breeze that bent
all the reeds and slowly swayed the water-flowers. One thin white
line of wind streaked the blue sky. He shipped his sculls and drifted,
listening to the wood-pigeons, watching the swallows chasing. If only
she were here! To spend one long day thus, drifting with the stream! To
have but one such rest from longing! Her cottage, he knew, lay on the
same side as the village, and just beyond an island. She had told him of
a hedge of yew-trees, and a white dovecote almost at the water's edge.
He came to the island, and let his boat slide into the backwater. It
was all overgrown with willow-trees and alders, dark even in this early
morning radiance, and marvellously still. There was no room to row; he
took the boathook and tried to punt, but the green water was too deep
and entangled with great roots, so that he had to make his way by
clawing with the hook at branches. Birds seemed to shun this gloom, but
a single magpie crossed the one little clear patch of sky, and flew low
behind the willows. The air here had a sweetish, earthy odour of too
rank foliage; all brightness seemed entombed. He was glad to pass out
again under a huge poplar-tree into the fluttering gold and silver of
the morning. And almost at once he saw the yew-hedge at the border of
some bright green turf, and a pigeon-house, high on its pole, painted
cream-white. About it a number of ring-doves and snow-white pigeons were
perched or flying; and beyond the lawn he could see the dark veranda of
a low house, covered by wistaria just going out of flower. A drift
of scent from late lilacs, and new-mown grass, was borne out to him,
together with the sound of a mowing-machine, and the humming of many
bees. It was beautiful here, and seemed, for all its restfulness, to
have something of that flying quality he so loved about her face, about
the sweep of her hair, the quick, soft turn of her eyes--or was that but
the darkness of the yew-trees, the whiteness of the dovecote, and the
doves themselves, flying?

He lay there a long time quietly beneath the bank, careful not to
attract the attention of the old gardener, who was methodically pushing
his machine across and across the lawn. How he wanted her with him then!
Wonderful that there could be in life such beauty and wild softness as
made the heart ache with the delight of it, and in that same life grey