“I have something to say to you,” he began. “An explanation, more than a confession. What do you know of me, after all? Very little, beyond that I am a stranger settled in these parts, living a lonely life in a remote farm-house with one old servant and a groom. You know that I have no regular occupation; that I read the classics in a desultory way; dabble in archæology, and interest myself in the local customs and topography. You know that my leisure is unlimited, and my means ample. You appear to take me for granted, but then I never attributed to you an inquisitive mind. Have you ever wondered where I came from, and why? have you, above all, never despised me a little for my idleness of a dilettante while all around you you saw other men work for their livelihood?” “Perhaps I have despised you a little for that,” she said frankly. “As for the rest, no, I don’t think I have wondered. I don’t see why you shouldn’t lead the life that pleases you best.” “Nevertheless,” he said, “I should like to give you my explanation, if you will be patient enough to listen. I loved a woman once,” he said, in a low mournful voice, as though he were disinterring the memory of the dead from his very bowels, and while he spoke he kept his eyes averted from Clare and held his unseeing gaze upon the clump of beeches on the high skyline; “she was wholly a woman, yet every great quality of woman she lacked; I mean to say, that in every mood of capriciousness and grace she was as wholly and divinely a woman as any woman who ever enchanted man and coloured the loveliness of his days, but under the test of all graver issues her fluidity turned to falseness and she slipped between my fingers. I never held her; no, though I held her in my arms she eluded me; even while I thought to possess her, her soul slid away from me in some new protean shape, and danced and laughed and mocked my pursuit. Oh, she was a will-o’-the-wisp dancing across the marshes of my life. For my life was indeed a marsh in those days; I sank in quicksands; I struggled out on to a tussock; I trusted myself again on what I took to be firmer ground, I sank once more, I was sucked back at every step, I was tempted to let myself sink for ever from sheer weariness and despair. But she,--she was at home among the treacheries and miasmas where she had led me; that light, vain soul could skim where I could only sink. Do you wonder,” he said, letting his eyes travel slowly round the clean sweep of the Downs, bare of all softness, and bringing them at last to rest upon her face, “can you wonder that I came to repair my life in this old, hard country? You may believe me or not, as you choose, but I got that image of the marsh so firmly fixed in my mind that to this day I can’t bear to walk across a bit of swampy ground, or even along a muddy lane. You have water here, in your country, that’s true, and plenty of it; but it’s straightforward water: running rivers, and dew-ponds up here on the heights.”