‘I should like it of all things, but my mother sets her face against any intercourse between the two families. She doesn’t even like my father to go to the audit dinner. And just now when she’s so ill, I don’t care to do anything that can vex her. So I’ll loaf about at home, while you go up yonder.’ ‘So be it, then, Martin. I think you’re quite right.’ The walk across the moorland was delightful in the late September weather, a fresh breeze blowing off the land, and the Atlantic’s mighty waves breaking silver-crested upon the rugged shore. ‘If Justina were but here!’ thought Maurice, with a longing for that one companion in whose presence he had found perfect contentment—the companion who always understood, and always sympathized—who laughed at his smallest jokelet, for whom his loftiest flight never soared too high. He thought of Justina, mewed up in her Bloomsbury parlour, while he was gazing on that wide ocean, breathing this ethereal air, and he felt as if there were selfishness in his enjoyment of the scene without her. ‘Will the day ever come when she and I shall be one, and visit earth’s fairest scenes together?’ he wondered. ‘Has she forgotten her romantic attachment to my poor friend, and can she give me a whole heart? I think she likes me. I have sometimes ventured to tell myself that she loves me. Yet there is that old memory. She can never give me a love as pure and perfect as that early passion—the firstfruits of her innocent, girlish heart, pure as those vernal offerings which the Romans gave their gods.’ He looked back to that summer day at Eborsham when he had seen the overgrown, shabbily clad girl, sitting in the meadow, with wild flowers in her lap, lifting her pale young face, and looking up at him with her melancholy eyes—eyes which had beheld so little of earth’s brightness. Nothing fairer than such a meadow on a summer afternoon. ‘I did not know that was my fate,’ he said to himself, remembering his critical, philosophical consideration of the group. Thinking of Justina shortened that moorland walk, the subject being, in a manner, inexhaustible; just that one subject which, in the mind of a lover, has no beginning, middle, or end. By and by the pedestrian struck into one of Squire Penwyn’s new roads, and admired the young trees in the Squire’s plantations, and the thickets of rhododendron planted here and there among the stems of Norwegian and Scotch firs. A keeper’s or forester’s lodge here and there, built of grey stone, gave an air of occupation to the landscape. The neatly kept garden, full of autumn’s gaudy flowers; a group of rustic children standing at gaze to watch the traveller.