But England, our own dear old England, has also a physiognomy that is all her own; that is like nothing else in all the world; pastures intensely green, high hawthorn hedges and muddy lanes, which to some minds is sad and strange and desolate and painful, and which to others is beautiful, but which, be it what else it may, is always wholly and solely English, can never be met with elsewhere, and has a smile of peace and prosperity upon it, and a sigh in it that make other lands beside it seem as though they were soulless and were dumb. We had unconsciously taken a path that, skirting a wood, ran up over a low hill southward. To our left lay the beautiful Cornish country in the sweet misty grey of the morning light. The sun was shining and the tremulous wood smoke curled up in the rosy air from a cottage chimney. Was that to be our last walk together, I wondered? I sighed when I recollected how utterly we were the children of circumstance. Beside her I walked with a swelling heart. I consumed my soul in muteness and bitterness, my eyes set before me to the grey hills behind which the sun had risen. CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR. "I AM NOT FIT!" Of a sudden, she turned her head and glanced full in my eyes. Her thoughts were, like mine, of the past--of those glad and gracious days. I stood still for a moment, and catching her hands kissed them; my own were burning. We went on by the curving course outside the wood quite silent, for the gloom of the future had settled upon us. The past! Those days when my Ella was altogether mine! I loved to linger on those blissful days, for they were lighted with the sweetest sunlight of my life. Never since, for me, had flowers blossomed, and fruits ripened, and waters murmured, and grasshoppers sung, and waves beat joyous music as in the spring and summer of that wondrous time. To rise when all the world was flushed with the soft pink of the earliest dawn, and to go hand in hand with her through the breast-high corn with scarlet poppies clasping the gliding feet; to see the purple wraith of rain haunting the silvery fairness of the hills; to watch the shadows chase the sun rays over the wide-open mysterious sea; to feel the living light of the cloudless day beat us with a million pulses amid the hum of life all around; to go out into the lustre of the summer's night; to breathe the air soft as the first kisses of our own new-found love, and rich as wine with the strong odours of a world of flowers. These had in those never-to-be-forgotten days been her joys and mine, joys at once of the senses and the soul. I loved her so--God knows! and yet almost I hated her. She had, on that night in Bayswater, deceived me! She had deceived me!