imself, to her nature, delicately strung. There was
nothing heroic about the way she had taken his downfall. But the
exquisite music of her, he further tutored himself, was not set to
martial strains. She was the loveliness of the twilight, of the evening
star. And then, when his days had fallen into a pallid sequence, she had
kept silence. It was as if there had been no wife, no Esther. At first
he made wild appeals to her, to his father for the assurance that she
was living even. Then one day in the autumn when he was watching a pale
ray of sunshine that looked as if it had been strained through sorrow
before it got to him, the verdict, so far as his understanding went, was
inwardly pronounced. His mind had been working on the cruel problem and
gave him, unsought, the answer. That was what she meant to do: to
separate her lot from his. There never would be an Esther any more.
There never had been the Esther that made the music of his strong belief
in her.

At first he could have dashed himself against the walls in the impotence
of having such bereavement to bear with none of the natural outlets to
assauge it. Then beneficent healing passions came to his aid, though
not, he knew, the spiritual ones. He descended upon scorn, and finally a
cold acceptance of what she was. And then she seemed to have died, and
in the inexorable sameness of the days and nights he dismissed her
memory, and he meditated upon life and what might be made of it by men
who had still the power to make. But now hurrying to her along the quiet
street, one clarifying word explained her, and, unreasoningly, brought
back his love. She had been afraid--afraid of him who would, in the old
phrase, have, in any sense, laid down his life for her: not less
willingly, the honourable name he bore among honourable men. A sense of
renewal and bourgeoning was upon him, that feeling of waking from a
dream and finding the beloved is, after all, alive. The old simple words
came back to him that used to come in prison when they dropped molten
anguish upon his heart:

--"After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again."

At least, if he was never to feel the soft rapture of his love's
acceptance, he might find she still lived in her beauty, and any
possible life would be too short to teach her not to be afraid. He
reached the house quickly and, with the haste of his courage, went up
the steps and tried the latch. In Add