Nothing could be more flattering, more essentially womanly than Fay's demeanour to him had become since he had set her mind at rest as to his intentions on that idyllic afternoon after the storm. (How he had set her mind at rest on that occasion he knew best.) It seemed this exquisite nature only needed the sunshine of his unspoken assurance to respond with delighted tenderness to his refined, his cultured advances. He was already beginning to write imaginary letters to his friends, on the theme of his engagement: semi-humourous academic effusions as to how he, who had so long remained immune, had succumbed at last to feminine charm; how he, the determined celibate--Wentworth always called himself a celibate--had been taken captive after all. To judge by the letters which Wentworth conned over in his after-dinner mind, and especially one to Grenfell, the conclusion was irresistible to the meanest intellect that he had long waged a frightful struggle with the opposite sex to have remained a bachelor--a celibate, I mean--so long. We have all different ways of enjoying ourselves. In the composition of these imaginary letters Wentworth tasted joy. * * * * * In these days Fay's boxes of primroses jostled each other in the postman's cart, on their way to cheer patients on their beds of pain in London hospitals. Fay read the hurried, grateful notes of busy matrons, over and over again. They were a kind of anodyne. On a blowing afternoon in the middle of April she made her way across the down with her basket to a distant hazel coppice to which she had not been as yet. A fever of unrest possessed her. She had thought when she confessed to Magdalen that her misery had reached its lowest depths. But it had not been so. Her wretchedness, momentarily relieved, had since gone a step deeper, that was all. She had endeavoured to allay her thirst with a cup of salt water, which had only increased it to the point of agony. As she walked a bare tree stretched out its naked arms to waylay her. It was the very tree under which Michael and she had kissed each other, six spring-tides ago. She recognised it suddenly, and turned her eyes away, as if a corpse were hanging in chains from one of its branches. Her averted eyes fell upon a seagull wheeling against the blue, the incarnation of freedom and the joy of life. She turned away her eyes again and hurried on, looking neither to right nor left. A light wind went with her, drawing her like a "kind constraining hand." She stumbled across the bare shoulder of the down to the wood below.