Madge has amused me by finding a way to express, in rather original fashion, her deepening sympathy with humankind. A courting is going on in our kitchen; every Friday night the lovers come, she from the village, he from a farm lying beyond the Hall; and every Friday night Madge either goes to bed early, or steps out to see her friends. The girl is a country lass rather ill-treated by a mistress who shall be nameless; she has no place to receive her lover, save the stone wall of the bridge across the stream. She steals here in the dusk on her one free evening; why not? The young man is a perfectly suitable wooer, and they are safer in my kitchen than out in the cold. Yet I admit that I feel a bit guilty when I very formally return the very formal greeting of the unconscious mistress. Just now, no one is staying with us, and there is blessed quiet. Through the silences in the little house, old moods, old laughter, old half-merry tears come back; you blend with all my days. Sometimes I feel, not as at first, that this is the end of things for me, but as if it were a little truce of God while I am waiting. To-day I found my first grey hairs; there were two, one on each temple; have you any to match them, I wonder? Ah, I keep forgetting, forgetting; keep thinking of you as still alive and suffering in this war. Remembering, I envy you; the many years ahead look formidable. Do you remember the day we took our fifteen-mile walk from Oxford in May, and sat to rest on the flat grey stones in an old, old village churchyard, with a tangle of wild vines at our feet, and primroses and violets blossoming near,--do you remember that we talked of immortality and decided that when one died it was death, that having lived was enough? At least you did; I always had "ma doots o' ma doots." I think it was just May that made us feel that way,--the fragrances, the bird songs, the sun-flecked clouds over the Cumnor Hills; you too were far more influenced by things outside the world of pure thought than you ever knew, my philosopher; have I not seen you mistaking a sunbeam for an optimistic syllogism? We doubted, dear, but we were wrong; you do not die; you are more intensely alive than ever.