“It looks well for me, little woman, me, a middle-aged country parson, with a fat parish, and reputed sane; but I would give it all, and my eyes into the bargain, to be in the thick of the turmoil—I don’t care a rap where, London holds no talisman for me any more than any other big centre—where men teem and life lives, for it seems even better to live in pain than to doze in apathy. Ah! if only my brutal health would have stood it!” “Poor John, how the old sore will break out!” she said tenderly, with a short, dry little sob, “and I too, I would give it all, and my eyes to boot, if I had just one little child.—And Mrs. Waring, up there in her fine house, would give it all if she could only grasp her lost motherhood. Two old sores and a new! “After all,” she added, “when all’s said and done, we are no worse off than our neighbours. None of us, it seems to me, get any more than the rags and fragments of their hearts’ desires, and yet we all manage to make life jolly on them. We do, John,” she said, with a gay little laugh.—It was wonderful how she managed it with her heart quivering.—“Look in my face and say we do!” He looked in her face, and he kissed her. CHAPTER XXV. WHEN Strange set out on his honeymoon, it was with a distinct project simmering in his brain. He meditated a good three months’ loiter through the byways of the Tyrol, on into Switzerland, and then home through the towns of the Netherlands, and all by routes best known to himself. It becomes, however, a moral impossibility for a man to loiter with any comfort by the side of a new-made wife, into whose very bones and marrow the spirit of unrest has crept, and so, by intangible gradations the loiter had developed into a tumultuous forging on. Gwen seemed possessed by a very dignified and quite calm-seeming devil; he was a gentlemanly creature and made no untoward fuss or excitement, but movement he must have, he dared not rest. In spite of herself, Gwen found growing in her from the very day of her marriage, a craving, full of subdued fierceness, to be in the very middle of the hurly-burly, no matter whether it raged in a fashionable hotel, or, in the market-place of a country town. She had, besides, other uncomfortable ways. In valleys, where the sun shone and the wind rested, and where ordinary mortals were bathed in a soft entrancement of delight, she seemed to lose half her life. On the contrary, she lived, her voice regained its timbre, her eyes shone, her mouth laughed, her very hair sparkled with vitality, as soon as ever she got high on a mountain—the bleaker and harsher the better. One day they had climbed to the top of the D’Auburg, a dour-looking mountain in the Tyrol generally avoided of tourists, but for some reason Gwen took it into her head to ascend it.