Nevertheless the feeling that forced itself into Christian Vellacott's
waking thoughts was not peaceful. It was a sense of discomfort.
Town-people expect too much from the country--that is the truth of it.
They quite overlook the fact that where human beings are there can be no
peace.

This sudden sense of restlessness annoyed him. He knew it so well. It
had hovered over his waking head almost daily during the last two years,
and here, in the depths of the country, he had expected to be without
it. Moreover, he was conscious that he had not brought the cause with
him. He had found it, waiting.

There were many things--indeed there was almost everything--to make his
life happy and pleasant at St. Mary Western. But in his mind, as he woke
up on this first morning, none of these things found place. He came to
his senses thinking of the one little item which could be described as
untoward--thinking of Hilda, and Hilda engaged to be married to Fred
Farrar. It was not that he was in love with Hilda Carew himself. He had
scarcely remembered her existence during the last two years. But this
engagement jarred, and Farrar jarred. It was something more than the
very natural shock which comes with the news that a companion of our
youth is about to be married--shock which seems to shake the memory of
that youth; to confuse the background of our life. It is by means of
such shocks as these that Fate endeavours vainly to make us realise that
the past is irrevocable--that we are passing on, and that that which has
been can never be again. And at the same time we learn something else:
namely, that the past is not by any means unchangeable. So potential is
To-day that it not only holds To-morrow in the hollow of its hand, but
it can alter Yesterday.