Could he distinguish her house among the rest? He was not sure. The rays of the great June sun were almost horizontal, as it sank down towards Glastonbury; and it was all he could do, even with his eyes shaded by his hand, to identify the portion of the town where the bookshop was. As to seeing Christie’s window, it was impossible.

Annoyed by this refusal of Nature to humour his mood, he advanced obstinately still further up the road, and finally reached the stile into the field-path that led to the turfy ramparts of Poll’s Camp.

There he sat down among the tall, uncut grasses of the wayside, and allowed the double stream of memories⁠—those connected with Poll’s Camp and those connected with that invisible window below him⁠—to contend for the mastery in his thoughts. The extraordinary thing was that all that poetry of his first encounter with Gerda seemed like something that had happened to some external portion of his nature, whereas this strange new understanding with Christie sank so deep into his being that it invaded regions of which he himself had hardly been aware.