Introduction

On their silver wedding anniversary the middle-aged gentleman Ashurst and his wife drive across the Devon moors and stop to picnic at a crossroads. Beside the road he notices a lonely grave, and it stirs a memory twenty-six years old. That spring, just down from Oxford and on a walking tour nearby, he twisted his ankle and found lodging at a farmhouse, where he met the farm girl Megan. Beneath the white-blossomed apple tree and beside the stream, the two fell into an innocent and ardent love. He promised to run away with her and went into town to buy her clothes and draw money, but there he met an old school friend and his beautiful, refined sister; he hesitated, drew back, never returned, and later married the sister. Only now does he learn from an old man that the lonely grave holds Megan, who drowned herself for him. The epigraph comes from Euripides: 'The Apple-tree, the singing, and the gold.'