red
till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was
that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand
in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it
true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in
that enchanted land--whether we rode side by side through London streets
in a hansom--"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it--(for our dream
stretches as far back as that prehistoric day--How old one of us seems
to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)--or sat and laughed
at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed
at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white
napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we
drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were
right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are
perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows
but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so
far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it
well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit
grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and
whispering over graves.

Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives,
moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained
that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in
dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of
such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of
being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether
of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking
deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the
enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to
hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally
escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other
dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the
prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance
and death.

Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that
perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring
them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They
came upon us so suddenly