to this day a dewy morning in late august brings back the thought of mary and those stolen meetings. i have the minutest recollection of the misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored boots. our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. and i feel the same hungry freshness again at the thought of those stolen meetings. presently came the sunrise, blinding, warming, dew-dispelling arrows of gold smiting through the tree stems, a flood of light foaming over the bracken and gilding the under sides of the branches. everything is different and distinctive in those opening hours; everything has a different value from what it has by day. all the little things upon the ground, fallen branches, tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the light and merged with the sky. and at last, a cool grey outline against the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes mary, flitting, adventurous, friendly, wonderful.
"oh stevenage!" she cries, "to see you again!"
we each hold out both our hands and clasp and hesitate and rather shyly kiss.
"come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. it's still not six. and there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the wet. oh! it's so good to be out of things again—clean out of things—with you. look! there is a stag watching us."
"you're glad to be with me?" i ask, jealous of the very sunrise.
"i am always glad," she says, "to be with you. why don't we always get up at dawn, stevenage, every day of our lives?"
we go rustling through the grass to the prostrate timber she has chosen. (i can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that lifted her skirt.) i help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from which her feet can swing....
such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this morning. but then comes our conversation, and that i find vague and irregularly obliterated. but i think i must have urged her to say she loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to put my heart's wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three years for me—until i could prove it was not madness for her to marry me. "i have been thinking of it all night and every night since i have been here," i said. "somehow i will do something. in some way—i will get hold of things. believe me!—with all my strength."
i was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon me.
"stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear boy; i have never wanted to kiss you so much in all my life. dear, come close to me."
she bent her fresh young face down to mine, her fingers were in my hair.
"my knight," she whispered close to me. "my beautiful young knight."
i whispered back and touched her dew fresh lips....
"and tell me what you would do to conquer the world for me?" she asked.
i cannot remember now a word of all the vague threatenings against the sundering universe with which i replied. her hand was on my shoulder as she listened....
but i do know that even on this first morning she left me with a sense of beautiful unreality, of having dipped for some precious moments into heroic gossamer. all my world subjugation seemed already as evanescent as the morning haze and the vanishing dews as i stood, a little hidden in the shadows of the killing wood and ready to plunge back at the first hint of an observer, and watched her slender whiteness flit circumspectly towards the house.
