He had not asked for it: he never would. Better than all, he was content to believe in her. He, whom a diseased mistrust of his fellow-creatures had driven from the world for the best part of his life, could show to her, now in circumstances so extraordinary, this beautiful blind confidence. Oh, how she loved him for it! How rich, since he loved her thus, should be his reward! How happy was she in this planning of the supreme moment of his joy! So, with the touch of the rector’s fatherly hand upon her brow, and aunt Sophia’s last tear-bedewed kiss upon her cheek; with her familiar old grey cloak wrapped round her wedding finery, and the little bunch from the Herb-Garden (Barnaby’s quaint offering) sweet upon her breast, she passed forth from the little autumnal orchard into the vast green spaces of the park. Close against David she pressed, leaning upon him, walking in thought-laden silence. In silence too he went, respecting her mood; but each time he turned his face upon her under the yellow light, she marked its radiance; and in the quivering trouble of her joy all the web of her pretty schemes seemed shaken apart, so that she was fain to begin to weave afresh. It was a lemon and orange sunset reflected round the sky—the sunset that presages storm—and the wind was already high and tore with swelling organ-chant through the trees of the avenue; a great mild west wind, booming up from the woods, hurling past them with a beat as of wide soft wings and rushing on with its song of triumph. “Let us go by the wood,” said Ellinor. He turned to her quickly, the glory of the sinking day in his eyes. “To you too, then,” he said, “this is a good hour! Listen to our wedding choral that the wind now sings in the arches of these trees.” They turned across the turf towards where elm and ash, oak and scented pine made a night of their own already, though at the top of many a swaying bough the thrush and the blackbird still piped to the gleaming west; though the rooks were still circling and the first star shone no brighter than a small white daisy in a strip of eastward sky, faintly green like a fairy field. In the woody depths they drew yet closer together. Here, though the wind-voices were never hushed at all, but kept up their chant continuously overhead, the lower spaces seemed so still, that the lovers almost thought to go in silence beneath a canopy of sound. They heard the faintest leaf whisper as they passed it, and the tiniest twig snap beneath their tread. Suddenly David halted. “Strange,” said he, passing his hand across his brow. “How often there has come upon me of late a memory as of a dream—a dream of woods and of you. A dream of woods and of love! And yet you were not with me. Nay, now it comes back; you were not with me, but I was going to you; and the trees were all speaking of you and bidding me haste to you. A mad dream, but sweet!”