ing to
her compassion.

Her look enveloped him. "And I shall see you always--always!"

"Why go then--?" escaped him.

"To be nearer you," she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
closing door.

The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little
of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought
by Mrs. Aubyn's gradual translation into terms of universality. In
becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that
Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on
a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated,
by popular veneration.

Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of
a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.

In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with
literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of
her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity.
He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors
who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their
friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden
sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed,
humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope
of her interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but
he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a
distinguished woman; had never measured the literary significance of her
oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in
his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like
this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her
something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified
his claim.

He sat a long time staring at the scattered