of love became blurred in her
memory. At times, remorsefully, as if struggling against a lethargy
mysteriously imposed upon her natural instincts, she strove to revive
her grief in its full strength; and then, for an instant, her
recollections became as poignant as though he had been with her only
yesterday. But that perception could not always be evoked at will; and
ordinarily Lilla was aware only of a faint echo from a distant region
of pathos and delight--an echo that reached her, through a host of
other sounds, like the intrinsic spirit of an ultra-modern symphony, so
wrapped up in dissonances as to be nearly unintelligible.

"Where is he?" she wondered. "Are those right who would say that he
has ceased to exist except in memory?"

At this thought she wept, not for him so much as for the blurring of
her remembrance of him. And sometimes, when she had not thought of him
all day, she was awakened in the night by her own cry:

"Give me back my love! Give me back my grief!"

Rising from her bed, she pored over the books on spiritualism that
still formed a long row on the shelf of her writing desk. She envied
the women who were reported to have received, through automatic
writing, messages from the dead. She sat down, in the silence of the
night, to hold over the clean sheet of paper the perpendicular pencil.
With her head bowed forward, her pose an epitome of patience, she fixed
her eyes upon the pencil point, which slowly made meaningless curlicues.

But suddenly, when she was expecting nothing, there passed through her
a tingling warmth such as that which must pervade the earth at
spring-time. She stared round the room with the thought, "His spirit
is here!"

And she uttered, very distinctly, in the hope that the words might
penetrate his world from hers:

"I love you as much as ever!"

Those moments became rare. At last they ceased to occur.

"He has passed so far into the beyond that he can no longer return to
me."

As if it had been awaiting this acknowledgment, a thicker curtain
descended between Lilla and the past.

And now she was like some medieval chatelaine who, emerging from a dark
and lonely castle, views all the gewgaws that a far-wandering peddlar
has spread out for her in the sun.

There were the art galleries filled with statues in inchoate or
tortured forms, or with paintings that seemed to Lilla to have been
conceived by madmen, yet in which certain persons declared that they