"These weren't the things we talked about when we saw the clouds gather over Skaw Fell and the sun shine on the Irish Sea. We've done and seen much since then. Multitudes have come and gone in the world--and I have grown grey!" he added with a laugh. "I've done little-nothing, and I meant and hoped to do much," she almost pleaded. "I've grown grey too." "Not one grey hair," he said, with an admiring look. "Grey in spirit sometimes," she reflected with a tired air. "But you--forgive me, if I haven't known what you've done. I've lived out of England so long. You may be at the head of the Government, for all I know. You look to me as though you'd been a success. Don't smile. I mean it. You look as though you'd climbed. You haven't the air of an eldest son whose way is cut out for him, with fifty thousand a year for compensation. What have you been doing? What has been your work in life?" "The opposite of yours." He felt himself a ruffian, but he consoled himself with the thought that the end at which he aimed was good. It seemed ungenerous to meet her simple honesty by such obvious repartee, but he held on to see where the trail would lead. "That doesn't seem very clear," she said in answer. "Since I came out here I've been a sort of riverine missionary, an apostle with no followers, a reformer with a plan of salvation no one will accept." "We are not stronger than tradition, than the long custom of ages bred in the bone and practised by the flesh. You cannot change a people by firmans; you must educate them. Meanwhile, things go on pretty much the same. You are a generation before your time. It is a pity, for you have saddened your youth, and you may never live to see accomplished what you have toiled for." "Oh, as to that--as to that . . ." She smoothed back her hair lightly, and her eyes wandered over the distant hills-mauve and saffron and opal, and tender with the mist of evening. "What does it matter!" she added. "There are a hundred ways to live, a hundred things to which one might devote one's life. And as the years went on we'd realise how every form of success was offset by something undone in another direction, something which would have given us joy and memory and content--so it seems. But-- but we can only really work out one dream, and it is the working out-- a little or a great distance--which satisfies. I have no sympathy with those who, living out their dreams, turn regretfully to another course or another aim, and wonder-wonder, if a mistake hasn't been made. Nothing is a mistake which comes of a good aim, of the desire for wrongs righted, the crooked places made straight. Nothing matters so that the dream was a good one and the heart approves and the eyes see far." She spoke as though herself in a dream, her look intent on the glowing distance, as though unconscious of his presence.