They both shook hands in rather an absent-minded way with Mr. Samuel Rust. They started from the door with the wind behind them. It was with her hair blowing forward along her cheeks that the gardener always remembered the suffragette most vividly. It brought a brave idea to his mind, connected vaguely with a picture of Grace Darling with which he had been in love fifteen years ago. “Gardener,” said the suffragette hurriedly. “Can you imagine me sitting by the fire bathing a baby?” “Easily,” he replied. “I can imagine how the firelight would dance upon your hair.” “That doesn’t sound like me at all,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “Can you imagine me, looking sleepy and cross, giving you early breakfast before you went to work?” “I can imagine you with the sun behind you, saying good-morning, so that the word seemed like a blessing through the day.” “It’s a lie—you poet,” she said. “Why don’t you open your eyes and see me as I am?” “I’ve had my eyes open all along. It’s you who are blind.” “Then—suppose we become both lovers and friends.... Suppose we get married on Tuesday....” To-morrow I will don my cloak Of opal-grey, and I will stand Where the palm shadows stride like smoke Across the dazzle of the sand. To-morrow I will throw this blind Blind whiteness from my soul away, And pluck this blackness from my mind, And only leave the medium—grey. To-morrow I will cry for gains Upon the blue and brazen sky: The precious venom in my veins To-morrow will be parched and dry. To-morrow it shall be my goal To throw myself away from me, To lose the outline of my soul Against the greyness of the sea. CHAPTER II The suffragette went up to London on Monday—Bank Holiday—to contemplate finally the ruin of her work. For it was dead. I suppose if she had not felt so old and tired she might have thought of a fresh beginning, but she was always more passionate than persistent. I don’t think the Brown Borough ever made her suffer so much as it did the day she came back to it and found no place for her. You must remember she had always put work before pleasure, and a new joy born had no place in her mind with the pain of work killed. The gardener of yesterday retreated from the foreground of her mind, and for a while she never thought at all of the gardener of to-morrow. Henceforward we part company with that suffragette whom I have loved perhaps a good deal, and of whom you have wearied. Her heart seemed to take on a different colour as she returned for the last time to the Brown Borough. What she had preached for years conquered her beyond hope at last, the world she had fought became suddenly victor. She went to Jenny Wigsky, and found her gone.