cousins and old schoolfellows, and though my mother had been widowed
untimely by a train accident, and had been reduced to letting lodgings
(she was the Clayton curate's landlady), a position esteemed much
lower than that of Mrs. Stuart, a kindly custom of occasional
visits to the gardener's cottage at Checkshill Towers still kept
the friends in touch. Commonly I went with her. And I remember it
was in the dusk of one bright evening in July, one of those long
golden evenings that do not so much give way to night as admit at
last, upon courtesy, the moon and a choice retinue of stars, that
Nettie and I, at the pond of goldfish where the yew-bordered walks
converged, made our shy beginners' vow. I remember still--something
will always stir in me at that memory--the tremulous emotion of
that adventure. Nettie was dressed in white, her hair went off in
waves of soft darkness from above her dark shining eyes; there was
a little necklace of pearls about her sweetly modeled neck, and
a little coin of gold that nestled in her throat. I kissed her
half-reluctant lips, and for three years of my life thereafter--nay!
I almost think for all the rest of her life and mine--I could have
died for her sake.

You must understand--and every year it becomes increasingly difficult
to understand--how entirely different the world was then from what
it is now. It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder,
preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid
unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of
the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent
beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience. The
great Change has come for ever more, happiness and beauty are our
atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men. None
would dare to dream of returning to the sorrows of the former time,