I was
after the effort was over--he asked me straight out if I intended to
marry Mr. Layard, and I asked him if he was mad! Then I put another
question, I don't know why; I never meant to do it, but it came up from
my heart--whether he had not said that he was going away? In answer he
explained that he was thinking of so doing, but had changed his mind.
Oh! I was pleased when I heard that. I was never so pleased in my life
before. After all, the gift of music is of some use.

"But why should I have been pleased? Mr. Monk's comings or goings are
nothing to me; I have no right to interfere with them, even indirectly,
or to concern myself about them. Yet I cried when I heard those
words, but I suppose it was the music that made me cry; it has that
inconvenient effect sometimes. Well, I have no doubt that he will see
plenty of Miss Porson, and it would have been a great pity to break off
the experiments just now."

One more extract from the very last entry in the series of books. It was
written at the Rectory on Christmas Eve, just before Stella started out
to meet Morris at the Dead Church:

"He--Colonel M.--asked me and I told him the truth straight out. I could
not help myself; it burst from my lips, although the strange thing is
that until he put it into my mind with the question, I knew _nothing_.
Then of a sudden, in an instant; in a flash; I understood and I knew
that my whole being belonged to this man, his son Morris. What is love?
Once I remember hearing a clever cynic argue that between men and women
no such thing exists. He called their affection by other names, and said
that for true love to be present the influence of sex must be absent.
This he proved by declaring that this marvellous passion of love about
which people talk and write is never heard of where its object is old or
deformed, or even very ugly, although such accidents of chance and time
are no bar to the true love of--let us say--the child and the parent, or
the friend and the friend.

"Well, the argument seemed difficult to answer, although at the time
I knew that it must be wrong, but how could I, who was utterly without
experience, talk of such a hard matter? Now I understand that love; the
real love between a man and a woman, if it be real, embraces all the
other sorts of love. More--whether the key be physical or spiritual, it
unlocks a window in our hearts through which we see a different world
from the world that we have known. Also wit