ica, it was this very day one year ago that you
walked into my office, bringing with you hope and joy like the scent of
fresh flowers on the breath of summer--making as it were a dayspring
within my sombre life more filled with glorious promise than the dawn that
even now begins to break against my windows. It was doubtless the
half-conscious recollection of this anniversary that troubled my
dream--dream I call it, and yet there is a conviction strong upon me that
somehow my spirit, or some emanation of my spirit, was actually abroad
this night seeking yours, that somehow, when I cried aloud, the sound of
my voice penetrated to you through the darkness and distance. Be at peace,
beloved; for this rising sun shall not set until I am with you; and no
power of fanaticism, nor any brooding phantasy of mine, shall ever draw us
apart. Fear not, beloved; be at peace till I come.

LXII

JESSICA TO PHILIP

I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack.
But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine,
out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I
wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I
now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest
when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold
you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me
since! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch.
But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to
become the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent to
this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a
Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a
Hottentot,--provided either were possible.

I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come
here; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why did
you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than
the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less
wisdom,--you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own
heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to
follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into
it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with
me it has been war. I have been like a small province in