had always believed that she had come out of the star-shine like a
goddess when it pleases Divinity to lie with a mortal. Of this he was
sure, that he had never kissed her except in this belief.... This had
sanctified their love, whereas other men knew love as an animal
satisfaction. It had always seemed to him that there was something
essential in her, something which had always been in human nature and
which always would be. This light, this joy, and this aspiration he
had seen in certain moments: when she walked on the stage as
Elizabeth or Elza, she had always seemed to reflect a little of that
light which floats down through the generations ... illuminating "the
liquid surface of man's life." But a change had come, darkening that
light, causing it to pass, at least into eclipse. He drew his hand
across his eyes--a phase of her life was hidden from him; yet it,
too, may have had a meaning.... We understand so little of life. No,
no, it had no meaning in his mind, and we are only concerned with our
own minds. All the same, the fact remained--she had had to seek rest
in a convent; and the idea that had driven her there, though now
lying at the bottom of her mind, might be brought to the surface--any
chance word; he had had proof. Perhaps it was as well that he had not
laid his hand upon her shoulder and asked her to stay with him, for
by what spectacle of remorse, of terror, might he not have been
confronted to-morrow or the next day? Cured! Nobody is ever cured.
Never again would she be the same woman as had left Dulwich to go to
Paris with him, he knew that well enough; and he, too, was very far
indeed from being the same Owen Asher who had gone to Dulwich to hear
a concert of Elizabethan music.

A period for every one, for every one a season. The gates of love
open, and we pass into the garden and out of it by another gate,
which never opens for us again. To linger by a closed or a closing
gate is not wise: the tarrying lover is a subject for contempt and
jeers; better to pass out quickly and to fare on, though it requires
courage to fare on through the autumn, knowing that after autumn
comes winter. True, the winds would grow harder. The autumn of their
lives was not over, the skies were still bright above them, and the
winds soft and low. The winds would grow harder, but they must still
fare on through the snow. But there is a joy by the hearth when the
yule-log is burning. So thanking God that he had not attemp