re joyful shut
your ears against him, for you may keep peace, but never joy, while he
is singing. He knows all about it, "love's labor lost," the gray face of
young Love dead, the hard-wrought grave in the live rock where he is
buried. And he tells of it again and again and again, as if Love's sharp
sword had indeed reddened his little breast, until the heart aches to
hear him. But he tells also that consolation is folded not in
forgetfulness, but in remembrance. That is why he sings in the silence
of the autumn dawn, before Memory closes her eyes, and again near
sunset, when Memory wakes.

Still Rachel sat motionless.

She had labored with dumb unreasoning passion to forget, as a man works
his hand to the bone night after night, week after week, month after
month, to file through the bars of his prison. She found at last that
forgetfulness came not of prayer and fasting; that it was not in her to
forget. The past had seemed to stretch its cruel, desecrating hand over
all the future, cutting her off from the possibility of love and
marriage, and from the children whom in dreams she held in her arms. As
she had said to Hester, she thought she "had nothing left to give."

But now the dead past had risen from its grave in her meeting with her
former lover, and in a moment, in two short days and wakeful nights, the
past relinquished its false claim upon her life. She saw that it was
false, that she had been frightened where no fear was, that her
deliverance lay in remembrance itself, not in the handcuffs with which
until now she had bound her deliverer.

Mr. Tristram had come back into her life, and with his own hands had
destroyed the overthrown image of himself, which lay like a barrier
across her heart. He had replaced it by an accurate presentment of
himself as he really was.

"Only that which is replaced is destroyed," and it is often our real
self in its native rags, and not, as we jealously imagine, another king
in richer purple who has replaced us in the throne-room of the heart
that loved us. To the end of life Rachel never forgot Mr. Tristram, any
more than the amber forgets its fly. But she was vaguely conscious as he
left her that he had set her free. She listened to his retreating step
hardly daring to breathe. It was too good to be true. At last there was
dead silence. No echo of a footfall. Quite gone. He had departed not
only out of her presence, but out of her life.

She breathed again. A tremor, lik