he
day of Bridget's fever when Harris had given him her note to Maule, and
he had sat here huddled on the edge of the bed wrestling dumbly with
his agony. The association had been too painful, and in his daily
tendance he had somewhat neglected this room and had usually entered
the other by the French window from the veranda. Thus, he saw now that
a bloated tarantula had established itself in one corner, between wall
and ceiling, and an uncanny looking white lizard scuttered across the
boards, and disappeared under a piece of furniture, leaving its tail
behind. A phenomenon of natural history at which, he remembered now,
Bridget had often wondered.

He opened the door of communication--where on that memorable night, he
had knocked and received no answer--and passed through it treading
softly as though he were visiting a death chamber. And indeed, to him,
it was truly a death chamber in which the bed, all covered over with a
white sheet, might have been a bier, and the pillows put lengthwise
down it, the shrouded form of one dearly loved and lost. He gazed
about, staring at the familiar pieces of furniture, out of wide red
eyes, smarting with unshed tears. In her looking glass, he seemed to
see the ghost-reflection of her small pale face with its old whimsical
charm. The shadowy eyes under the untidy mass of red-brown hair, in
which the curls and tendrils stood out as if endowed with a magnetic
life of their own; the sensitive lips; the little pointed chin; and, in
the eyes and on the lips, that gently mocking, alluring smile.

There were a few poems that Colin had taught himself to say by heart,
and which he would recite to himself often when he was alone in the
Bush. THE ANCIENT MARINER was one, and there were some of Rudyard
Kipling's and he loved THE IDYLLS OF THE KING--in especial GUINIVERE.
Three lines of that poem leaped to his memory at this moment.

'THY SHADOW STILL WOULD GLIDE FROM ROOM TO ROOM
AND I SHOULD EVERMORE BE VEXT WITH THEE
IN HANGING ROBE AND VACANT ORNAMENT.'

He went to the wardrobe where her dresses hung as she had left them,
only that daily, he had shaken them, cared for them so that no hot
climate pest should injure them. And in so doing, he had been
overwhelmingly conscious of the peculiar, personal fragrance, her
garments had always exhaled--an experience in which rapture and anguish
blended.

How he had loved her! ... God! how he had loved her! ... And yet,
latterly, how he ha