My father beckons me from the lattice.
All is finished.' 'Let us go then,' I answered huskily, and drew her behind the trunk of the old beech.

And there I caught her in my arms and kissed her again and yet again, nor was she ashamed to kiss me back.
After this I remember little of what happened, except that as we rode away I saw her beloved face, wan and wistful, watching me departing out of her life.

For twenty years that sad and beautiful face haunted me, and it haunts me yet athwart life and death.

Other women have loved me and I have known other partings, some of them more terrible, but the memory of this woman as she was then, and of her farewell look, overruns them all.

Whenever I gaze down the past I see this picture framed in it and I know that it is one which cannot fade.