come and go. To-day my light is out..."

To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I imagined
she said "chloral." Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis flashed it on
my brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freak
of memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There the
word stands in my memory, as if it were written in fire.

We came to the door of Lady Osprey's garden at last, and it was
beginning to drizzle.

She held out her hands and I took them.

"Yours," she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; "all that I had--such
as it was. Will you forget?"

"Never," I answered.

"Never a touch or a word of it?"

"No."

"You will," she said.

We looked at one another in silence, and her face full of fatigue and
misery.

What could I do? What was there to do?

"I wish--" I said, and stopped.

"Good-bye."

IV

That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destined
to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I forget
altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the station
believing her to be gone away she came upon me, and she was riding with
Carnaby, just as I had seen them first. The encounter jumped upon us
unprepared. She rode by, her eyes dark in her white face, and scarcely
noticed me. She winced and grew stiff at the sight of me and bowed her
head. But Carnaby, because he thought I was a broken and discomfited
man, saluted me with an easy friendliness, and shouted some genial
commonplace to me.

They passed out of sight and left me by the roadside....

And then, indeed, I tasted the ultimate bitterness of life. For the
first time I felt utter futility, and was wrung by emotion that begot no
action, by shame and pity beyond words. I had parted from her dully and
I had seen my uncle break and die with dry eyes and a steady mind, but
this chance sight of my lost Beatrice brought me to tears. My face was
wrung, and tears came pouring down my cheeks. All the magic she had for
me had changed to wild sorrow. "Oh God!" I cried, "this is too much,"
and turned my face after her and made appealing gestures to the beech
trees and cursed at fate. I wanted to do preposterous things, to pursue
her, to save her, to turn life back so that she might begin again.
I wonder what would have happened had I overtaken them in pursuit,
breathless with running, uttering incoherent words, weeping,
expostulatory. I came near to doing th