l if he were not first with a certain
lady. The love whose star had caught in the hair of Sylvia, now lying
there asleep. A so-called love--that half-glamorous, yet sordid little
meal of pleasure, which youth, however sensitive, must eat, it seems,
some time or other with some young light of love--a glimpse of life that
beforehand had seemed much and had meant little, save to leave him
disillusioned with himself and sorry for his partner. And then the love
that he could not, even after twenty years, bear to remember; that
all-devouring summer passion, which in one night had gained all and lost
all terribly, leaving on his soul a scar that could never be quite
healed, leaving his spirit always a little lonely, haunted by the sense
of what might have been. Of his share in that night of tragedy--that
'terrible accident on the river'--no one had ever dreamed. And then the
long despair which had seemed the last death of love had slowly passed,
and yet another love had been born--or rather born again, pale, sober,
but quite real; the fresh springing-up of a feeling long forgotten, of
that protective devotion of his boyhood. He still remembered the
expression on Sylvia's face when he passed her by chance in Oxford
Street, soon after he came back from his four years of exile in the East
and Rome--that look, eager, yet reproachful, then stoically ironic, as if
saying: 'Oh, no! after forgetting me four years and more--you can't
remember me now!' And when he spoke, the still more touching pleasure in
her face. Then uncertain months, with a feeling of what the end would
be; and then their marriage. Happy enough--gentle, not very vivid, nor
spiritually very intimate--his work always secretly as remote from her as
when she had thought to please him by putting jessamine stars on the
heads of his beasts. A quiet successful union, not meaning, he had
thought, so very much to him nor so very much to her--until forty-eight
hours ago he told her; and she had shrunk, and wilted, and gone all to
pieces. And what was it he had told her?

A long story--that!

Sitting there by the fire, with nothing yet decided, he could see it all
from the start, with its devilish, delicate intricacy, its subtle slow
enchantment spinning itself out of him, out of his own state of mind and
body, rather than out of the spell cast over him, as though a sort of
fatal force, long dormant, were working up again to burst into dark
flower. . . .

II