The special spring that had constantly played for him the day before was the recognition--frequent enough to surprise him--of the promises to himself that he had after his other visit never kept.

The reminiscence to-day most quickened for him was that of the vow taken in the course of the pilgrimage that, newly-married, with the War just over, and helplessly young in spite of it, he had recklessly made with the creature who was so much younger still.

It had been a bold dash, for which they had taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than by this private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed with the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it should bear a good harvest.

He had believed, sailing home again, that he had gained something great, and his theory--with an elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even, every few years--had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it.

As such plans as these had come to nothing, however, in respect to acquisitions still more precious, it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of seed.