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“This isn’t the road. ”

“I think so. Down this path, past the well, and out by the white gate. ”

“But that’s not the public road. ”

“I suppose not. I used to come so often, in Naylor’s time, I had forgotten. Where is he, by the way?”

“Crippled with rheumatism,” the keeper answered reluctantly.

“Is he?” Syson exclaimed in pain.

“And who might you be?” asked the keeper, with a new intonation.

“John Adderley Syson; I used to live in Cordy Lane. ”

“Used to court Hilda Millership?”

Syson’s eyes opened with a pained smile. He nodded. There was an awkward silence.

“And you—who are you?” asked Syson.

“Arthur Pilbeam—Naylor’s my uncle,” said the other.

“You live here in Nuttall?”

“I’m lodgin’ at my uncle’s—at Naylor’s. ”

“I see!”

“Did you say you was goin’ down to Willey–Water?” asked the keeper.

“Yes. ”

There was a pause of some moments, before the keeper blurted: “I’M courtin’ Hilda Millership. ”

The young fellow looked at the intruder with a stubborn defiance, almost pathetic. Syson opened new eyes.

“Are you?” he said, astonished. The keeper flushed dark.

“She and me are keeping company,” he said.

“I didn’t know!” said Syson. The other man waited uncomfortably.

“What, is the thing settled?” asked the intruder.

“How, settled?” retorted the other sulkily.

“Are you going to get married soon, and all that?”

The keeper stared in silence for some moments, impotent.

“I suppose so,” he said, full of resentment.

“Ah!” Syson watched closely.

“I’m married myself,” he added, after a time.

“You are?” said the other incredulously.

Syson laughed in his brilliant, unhappy way.

“This last fifteen months,” he said.

The keeper gazed at him with wide, wondering eyes, apparently thinking back, and trying to make things out.

“Why, didn’t you know?” asked Syson.

“No, I didn’t,” said the other sulkily.

There was silence for a moment.

“Ah well!” said Syson, “I will go on. I suppose I may. ” The keeper stood in silent opposition. The two men hesitated in the open, grassy space, set around with small sheaves of sturdy bluebells; a little open platform on the brow of the hill. Syson took a few indecisive steps forward, then stopped.

“I say, how beautiful!” he cried.

He had come in full view of the downslope. The wide path ran from his feet like a river, and it was full of bluebells, save for a green winding thread down the centre, where the keeper walked. Like a stream the path opened into azure shallows at the levels, and there were pools of bluebells, with still the green thread winding through, like a thin current of ice-water through blue lakes. And from under the twig-purple of the bushes swam the shadowed blue, as if the flowers lay in flood water over the woodland.

“Ah, isn’t it lovely!” Syson exclaimed; this was his past, the country he had abandoned, and it hurt him to see it so beautiful. Woodpigeons cooed overhead, and the air was full of the brightness of birds singing.

“If you’re married, what do you keep writing to her for, and sending her poetry books and things?” asked the keeper. Syson stared at him, taken aback and humiliated. Then he began to smile.

“Well,” he said, “I did not know about you … ”

Again the keeper flushed darkly.

“But if you are married—” he charged.

“I am,” answered the other cynically.

Then, looking down the blue, beautiful path, Syson felt his own humiliation. “What right have Ito hang on to her?” he thought, bitterly self-contemptuous.

“She knows I’m married and all that,” he said.

“But you keep sending her books,” challenged the keeper.

Syson, silenced, looked at the other man quizzically, half pitying. Then he turned.

&#
8220;Good day,” he said, and was gone. Now, everything irritated him: the two sallows, one all gold and perfume and murmur, one silver-green and bristly, reminded him, that here he had taught her about pollination. What a fool he was! What god-forsaken folly it all was!