of womanhood had been awakened; what
he would have offered to have a quarter of it now!

Pierston was almost angry with himself for his feelings of this night,
so unreasonably, motivelessly strong were they towards the lost young
playmate. 'How senseless of me!' he said, as he lay in his lonely bed.
She had been another man's wife almost the whole time since he was
estranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did not
make his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost
radiant, purity of this newsprung affection for a flown spirit forbade
him to check it. The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefied
and refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before.

The next afternoon he went down to the club; not his large club, where
the men hardly spoke to each other, but the homely one where they
told stories of an afternoon, and were not ashamed to confess among
themselves to personal weaknesses and follies, knowing well that such
secrets would go no further. But he could not tell this. So volatile and
intangible was the story that to convey it in words would have been as
hard as to cage a perfume.

They observed his altered manner, and said he was in love. Pierston
admitted that he was; and there it ended. When he reached home he looked
out of his bed-room window, and began to consider in what direction from
where he stood that darling little figure lay. It was straight across
there, under the young pale moon. The symbol signified well. The
divinity of the silver bow was not more excellently pure than she, the
lost, had been. Under that moon was the island of Ancient Slingers, and
on the island a house, framed from mullions to chimney-top like the
isle itself, of stone. Inside the window, the moonlight irradiating her
winding-sheet, lay Avice, reached only by the faint noises inherent in
the isle; the tink-tink of the chisels in the quarries, the surging of
the tides in the Bay, and the muffled grumbling of the currents in the
never-pacified Race.

He began to divine the truth. Avice, the departed one, though she had
come short of inspiring a passion, had yet possessed a ground-quality
absent from her rivals, without which it seemed that a fixed and
full-rounded constancy to a woman could not flourish in him. Like his
own, her family had been islanders for centuries--from Norman, Anglian,
Roman, Balearic-British times. Hence in her nature, as in his, was some
m