lasses, so to speak, through which a woman
complacently views her influence over a man, and it has cleared my
vision. A year has proved beyond mortal question that without me this
wayward and tormented spirit would fail. I hold in my hands the very
soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? You see I
use your metaphors still. Dearest of all dear friends, do not pity me.
Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star
of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity."

This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out from
Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me. It was not very
new, or subtle, or inspiring. But that is the way of things. No
matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive
inevitably at the commonplace.

CHAPTER XXII

I answered Judith's letter. After the long silence it seemed, at first,
strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening my heart as I
had never done before to man or woman. The fact that, accident aside,
we were never to meet again, drew the spiritual elements in us nearer
together, and the tone of her letter loosened the bonds of my natural
reserve. I told her of my past year of life, of the locked memorial
chamber upstairs, of the madness through which I had passed, of my weary
pursuit of the Theory, and of my attitude towards her solution of the
problem. Having written the letter I felt comforted, knowing that Judith
would understand.

I finished it about six o'clock one afternoon, and shrinking from giving
it to Stenson to post, as it was the first private letter I had written
since my arrival in London, I took it myself to the pillar-box. The
fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable indoor life I had been
leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early
touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked
along the decorous, residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling
less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in
progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate
opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of
satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the shaft of
light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed the white-capped
and aproned parlour-maid, and entering a waiting hansom, drove off into
the darkness whither my speculativ