"Do you remember," he asked her, "what we used to call the pearl light,
the soft crystalline glow before the sunrise, and how fresh and sweet
the air was when we scrambled up the hill?"
She nodded thoughtfully.
"I think very often of those days, and the dreams we used to weave
together. Sometimes I can scarcely believe how near we have come to
realising them. What a wonderfully still, lonely country it was."
"We used to sit and watch the smoke curl upwards from the cottages one
by one. The farm was always the first."
"Yes, Joan saw to that."
"And the nights. Do you remember how sweet the perfumes were--the
heather and the wild thyme? Those long cool nights, Cissy, when we
watched the lights flicker out one by one, and the corncrakes and the
barn owl came and made music for us."
"It is like a beautiful picture, the memory," she murmured.
"Build a fence around and keep it," he said. "Life there was an
abstraction, but a beautiful one. London has made man and woman of us,
but are we any happier, I wonder?"
"I am," she answered simply.
"You are happy because you have not grasped at shadows," he said,
bitterly. "You have taken the good which has come, and been thankful."
"And you," she replied, softly, "you are known already.
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