Somehow the monogram saved the signboard itself from being a washout as a work of art, and the Corporal felt grateful for it as he returned to the arbor to drink tea with his wife, while the landlord, less of a critic, went back to the raspberries in his prolific garden.
After an excellent tea William and Melia went up the road to Dibley. It was two miles on and they took a path of classic beauty, fringed by a grove of elms in which the rooks were cawing, along a carpet of green bracken through which the lovely river wound. Dibley stood high, at the crest of a great clump of woodland, with the Sharrow silver-breasted below surging through a glorious valley.
It was getting on for twenty years since Bill had last handed Melia over the stile at the top of the glade, famous in song and story, and they had debouched arm in arm past the vicarage, along the bridle path, and had threaded their way through a nest of thatched cottages to the village green. The sun had now waned a little and the air had cooled on these shaded heights, the tea had been refreshing, and, for a few golden moments, inexpressibly sweet yet tragically fleeting, the courage of youth came back to them. Just beyond the parson's gate the Corporal stopped suddenly, took Melia in his arms and kissed her.
It was a sloppy thing to do, unworthy of old married people, but the guilt of the act was upon them, though neither knew exactly why it should have come about. They crossed the paddock and went on through the romantic village, so sweetly familiar in its changelessness. It seemed but yesterday since they walked through it last.
"I've wondered sometimes," whispered the Corporal at the edge of the green, "what made you marry me?"
"I believed in you, Bill; I always believed in you." It was a great answer, yet somehow it was unexpected. In his heart he knew he was not worthy of it and that seemed to make it greater still.
Facing the duck pond, at the far end of the green, was the white cottage in which Torrington the artist had lived and died. It had changed a bit since his time. Things had been added by his more opulent successor. There were an iron gate, a considerable garden and a tall tower with a glass roof which nobly commanded the steep wooded slopes of the valley of the Sharrow.