I was seen in France—then in Australia—though I never left England. I was supposed to have died in the bush. She married a young fellow. Then I was proved to have died, and I read a little obituary notice on myself in a woman’s paper she subscribed to. She wrote it herself—as a warning to other young ladies of position not to be seduced by plausible “Poor Young Men.” Now she’s dead. They’ve got the paper—her paper—in the kitchen down there, and it’s full of photographs, even an old photo of me—“an unfortunate misalliance.” I feel, somehow, as if I were at an end too. I thought I’d grown a solid, middle-aged-man, and here I feel sore as I did at twenty-six, and I talk as I used to. One thing—I have got some children, and they’re of a breed as you’d not meet anywhere. I was a good animal before everything, and I’ve got some children.” He sat looking up where the big moon swam through the black branches of the yew. “So she’s dead—your poor peacock!” I murmured. He got up, looking always at the sky, and stretched himself again. He was an impressive figure massed in blackness against the moonlight, with his arms outspread. “I suppose,” he said, “it wasn’t all her fault.” “A white peacock, we will say,” I suggested. He laughed. “Go home by the top road, will you!” he said. “I believe there’s something on in the bottom wood.” “All right,” I answered, with a quiver of apprehension. “Yes, she was fair enough,” he muttered. “Ay,” said I, rising. I held out my hand from the shadow. I was startled myself by the white sympathy it seemed to express, extended towards him in the moonlight. He gripped it, and cleaved to me for a moment, then he was gone. I went out of the churchyard feeling a sullen resentment against the tousled graves that lay inanimate across my way. The air was heavy to breathe, and fearful in the shadow of the great trees. I was glad when I came out on the bare white road, and could see the copper lights from the reflectors of a pony-cart’s lamps, and could hear the amiable chat-chat of the hoofs trotting towards me. I was lonely when they had passed. Over the hill, the big flushed face of the moon poised just above the treetops, very majestic, and far off—yet imminent. I turned with swift sudden friendliness to the net of elm-boughs spread over my head, dotted with soft clusters winsomely. I jumped up and pulled the cool soft tufts against my face for company; and as I passed, still I reached upward for the touch of this budded gentleness of the trees. The wood breathed fragrantly, with a subtle sympathy. The firs softened their touch to me, and the larches woke from the barren winter-sleep, and put out velvet fingers to caress me as I passed. Only the clean, bare branches of the ash stood emblem of the discipline of life. I looked down on the blackness where trees filled the quarry and the valley bottoms, and it seemed that the world, my own home-world, was strange again.