ing to give.
She would write, as he wished, her real thoughts and feelings. They
would never know one another, and that would give her boldness. They
would be comrades, meeting only in dreamland.

In this way commenced the whimsical romance of Sylvia and Aston Rowant;
for it was too late now to change the name--it had become a name to
conjure with. The stories, poems, and essays followed now in regular
succession. The anxiously expected letters reached him in orderly
procession. They grew in interest, in helpfulness. They became the
letters of a wonderfully sane, broad-minded, thoughtful woman--a woman
of insight, of fine judgment. Their praise was rare enough to be
precious. Often they would contain just criticism, tempered by
sympathy, lightened by humour. Of her troubles, sorrows, fears, she
came to write less and less, and even then not until they were past and
she could laugh at them. The subtlest flattery she gave him was the
suggestion that he had taught her to put these things into their proper
place. Intimate, self-revealing as her letters were, it was curious he
never shaped from them any satisfactory image of the writer.

A brave, kind, tender woman. A self-forgetting, quickly-forgiving
woman. A many-sided woman, responding to joy, to laughter: a merry
lady, at times. Yet by no means a perfect woman. There could be
flashes of temper, one felt that; quite often occasional
unreasonableness; a tongue that could be cutting. A sweet, restful,
greatly loving woman, but still a woman: it would be wise to remember
that. So he read her from her letters. But herself, the eyes, and
hair, and lips of her, the voice and laugh and smile of her, the hands
and feet of her, always they eluded him.

He was in Alaska one spring, where he had gone to collect material for
his work, when he received the last letter she ever wrote him. They
neither of them knew then it would be the last. She was leaving
London, so the postscript informed him, sailing on the following
Saturday for New York, where for the future she intended to live.

It worried him that postscript. He could not make out for a long time
why it worried him. Suddenly, in a waste of endless snows, the
explanation flashed across him. Sylvia of the letters was a living
woman! She could travel--with a box, he supposed, possibly with two or
three, and parcels. Could take tickets, walk up a gangway, stagger
about a deck feeling, maybe, a littl