to
despise me, and that the gate of the garden will be forever shut--why, I
shall be punished as perhaps no woman has ever been punished before.
Still--_still_ I can't be sure that I would escape, if I could, by going
back to my old self!

It is writing of Belgium, and my days there with Brian while I still
hoped to see Jim, that brings all these thoughts crowding so thickly to
my mind, they seem to drip off my pen!

But what a different Ypres Father Beckett has now seen, and Brian
_felt_, from that dear, pleasant Ypres into which we two drove in a
cart, along a cobbled causeway as straight as a tight-drawn string!
Tourists who loved the blue, and yellow, and red bath-houses on the
golden beach of Ostend, didn't worry to motor over the bumpy road,
through the Flemish plain to Ypres. The war was needed to bring its sad
fame to "Wipers!" But Brian and I interrupted our walking tour with that
cart, because we knew that the interminable causeway would take us deep
into the inner quaintness of Flanders. We adored it all: and at every
stopping-place on the twenty-mile road, I had the secret joy of
whispering; "Perhaps it is _here_ that He will suddenly appear, and meet
us!"

There was one farmhouse on the way, where I longed to have him come. I
wanted him so much that I almost _created_ him! I was listening every
moment, and through every sound, for his car. It never came. But because
I so wished the place to be a background for our meeting I can see the
two large living-rooms of the old house, with the black-beamed ceilings,
the Flemish stoves, the tall, carved sideboards and chests with armorial
bearings, the deep window-seats that were flower-stands and work-tables
combined, and the shelves of ancient pottery and gleaming, antique
brass. There was a comfortable fragrance of new-baked bread, mingling
with the spicy scent of grass-pinks, in that house: and the hostess who
gave us luncheon--a young married woman--had a mild, sweet face,
strongly resembling that of St. Genevieve of Brabant, as pictured in a
coloured lithograph on the wall.

St. Genevieve's story is surely the most romantic, the most pathetic of
any saint who ever deigned to tread on earth!--and her life and death
might serve as an allegory of Belgium's martyrdom, poor Belgium, the
little country whose patron she is. Since that day at the farmhouse on
the road to Ypres, I've thought often of the gentle face with its
forget-me-not eyes and golden hair; and