With one of those unaccountable flashes by which an image is suddenly brought into our memory, there started before him a remembrance of her in the old Vicarage garden, that Sunday morning when he and she had strolled together to the mulberry-tree,--the quaintly formal hollyhocks, the busy martins flashing in and out, the daisies in the grass, Winifred softly singing the old psalm tune, and laying the cool rose against her cheek. Had he forgotten one of her words that day, this Winifred whom he did not love? And then he thought of her again at a time which he had never liked to look back upon, that winter day when she had met him in the lane, a spot of warm colour amidst the faded browns and greys,-- thought of the gate and the cold distant moorland, and the words which had struck a chill into his life. It had seemed to him then as if it had been she who had done it, and he had never been able to dissociate her from her tidings; so that no generous pity for the woman who had wounded him, nor any understanding that she had done it because from another it might have come with too cruel harshness, had stirred his heart, until now when another compassion had forced the door, turned his eyes from himself, and shown him what Winifred had been. The darkness reveals many things to us, and that night other things were abroad in the darkness,--death, the unfulfilled purpose of one whom he had chosen to regard as his enemy, if, indeed, it were not rather that God had fulfilled it in his own more perfect way,--these were working upon him, however unconsciously. Yet those revelations were full of anguish, opening out mistake after mistake in a manner which to a man who has over-trusted himself becomes an intolerable reproach. The accusation which had seemed literally to blast his life stood before him in juster, soberer proportions; his manner of meeting it became more cowardly and faithless, made bitter by an almost entire forgetfulness of the Hand from which the trial came. And in the midst of his angry despair, by his own act he must deliberately add another pang to his lot, and, putting away his friends, bind himself for life to a woman for whom his strongest feeling was the fancy for a smiling face. Perhaps, as yet, he hardly knew how slight that feeling was, but even by this time he was bitterly tasting the draught his own weakness had prepared. These thoughts all came to him with a quiet significance, adding tenfold to their power, yet touched by a certain solemn gravity which gave him the sense for which he most craved just now, the old childlike trustfulness in an overruling care. As we sow, so we must reap, but even the saddest harvest may yield us good sheaves, though not the crop we longed and hoped to gather. And this night was the first hour which seemed to bring Anthony face to face with his own work.