She sat down, breathless, with her back against the trunk of a small
Scotch fir. Burton threw himself on to the ground by her side.
"We think too much always of consequences," he said "After this evening,
what does anything matter? The gorse is a flaming yellow; do you see
how it looks like a field of gold there in the distance? Only the haze
separates it from the blue sky. Look down where I am pointing, Edith.
It was there by the side of the road that I first looked into the garden
and saw you."
"It was not you who looked," she objected, shaking her head. "It was
the other man."
"What part is it that survives?" he asked, a little bitterly. "Why
should the new man be cursed with memory? Don't you think that even
then there must have been two of me, one struggling against the
other--one seeking for the big things, one laying hold of the lower? We
are all like that, Edith! Even now I sometimes feel the tug, although
it leads in other directions."
"To Garden Green?" she murmured.
"Never that," he answered fiercely, "and you know it. There are lower
heights, though, in the most cultured of lives. There are moments of
madness, moments that carry one off one's feet, which come alike to the
slave and his master.
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