It was always a June afternoon when we went out together, into the meadows near her home; she moving with fluent grace as befitted a daughter of the woods, her eyes indrawing joy from all nature, her hair reflecting rich gold of the sunlight, her whole face lit with the pleasure of a bright hour; I a mere satellite attendant upon its central star. We strolled through the four home-meadows, crossed a high-banked lane and a dingle with a brook running down it, and then from an open common flooded with sunlight passed into a wood of tallest beeches. In that cool, shadowy place the sun, searching a way through crannies in the upper verdure, chequered with patches of silver light the even mast-strewn floor. The multitude of smooth grey stems rose aligned like cathedral columns; and the grateful dimness of the wood, succeeding the glare of day, wakened a sense of purposed protection and quietude pervading all things, which soothed the mind with the illusion that this was a sacred spot appointed for an offering of souls. Near one of those isles of sunlight we lingered; and as she looked up to the source of light, the movement brought her face near the slanting shaft of rays, until there was set round it an aureole of dancing beams. It seemed to me at this part of my dream that there came to both of us some gracious influence, for as her eyes met mine they dropped again, and were fixed for a moment upon the wild flowers she carried. Then my heart began to beat and my whole being to grow greater: impassioned words, to that hour unconceived, came rushing to my lips; the fire and glory of a new manhood were kindling in me to the transformation of my nature--when, in the very moment of utterance, a sheer barrier of doom descended between me and my joy; the fire was quenched, and my soul was poured out within me. To this fatal point my fancy always brought me and no further, that coming thus to the threshold of the house of joy and hearing the bars shoot into their sockets I might thoroughly know my ineffectual self and leave untouched the forbidden latch. So far I came in my dream times without number; and always on the verge of joy there came that doom, and the shooting of those adamantine bolts.