Leaning back against a little thyme-grown knoll, his hands clasped behind his head, Geff looked, with eyes that had learned the secret of most common things in Nature, at the moorland weeds around him. Here were graceful quake grasses in plenty, and waving sedges, and the poet’s wood-spurge, three cups in one. Close at his right hand grew a stalk of rush crowned by four or five brownish insignificant flowers, the least lovely outwardly of all the brilliant Guernsey flora. Well, and it came to pass that the neighbourhood of these degenerate, colourless petals altered Geff’s mood. He thought of the inherited mysteries and dooms of human life. He called to mind the sordid prose of the Cambridge outskirts, and the wretched men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who lived in them. He called to mind his own often despairing work, the struggles, hard and single-handed, of his manhood, his youth. His youth--ah! and with that the moorland scene faded. The years since he first saw Dinah spread themselves out scrollwise, suddenly illuminated, before Geff Arbuthnot’s mind. How well he remembered himself a lad of twenty! How well he remembered the hawthorn-scented evening of their first meeting! He was walking alone through the one street of Lesser Cheriton, had passed its rectory, its seven public-houses, was honestly thinking of his approaching ‘Mays’ and of nothing in the world beyond, when a cottage casement window opened just above his head, and looking up he saw her--unornamented, in russet gown and apron blue, a jug of water in her white hand ready for the thirsty row of mignonette and geranium slips in the window-box. He loved her, there and then. It was an old, a sacred story now, and Geoffrey questioned no syllable of the text as he scanned it quickly through. He took her picture back with him to his dark, book-strewn scholar’s attic in John’s, and that night he dreamed of her. Next morning he walked forth to Lesser Cheriton at the same hour, passed the rectory, the seven public-houses, and again caught glimpses of Dinah’s head as she sat, with a very fat old lady, alas! of a very humble class, in a close little parlour sewing, the lamp lighted, the windows fast shut, all the glories of the outside June night ignored.