had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white
slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John_!"

He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to
enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne's seemed lighted from
within, like an alabaster lamp.

Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met
in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things
to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden
through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of
adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and
he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had
hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they
passed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a
bill in Anne's fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the
gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.

But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining
upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she
could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train
on his way back to Anne.

But there was Anne's husband, and Christopher's friend--and more than
all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels
which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the
divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it
all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--