and not his memory but himself would follow her through the rooms and
by the dreamy lake at Gorston Old Hall. Yet even so, could he ever have
known the girl from tip to tip of her soul's wings, as he saw himself
destined to know her now, with six thousand miles of sea and land and
one man's death and another man's life between them? Would he have
learned from her lips and eyes the delicate truth of an exquisite
worship, as he had learned it to-day from her written tribute to a dead
soldier?

"My God! She's more mine than she could ever have been if I hadn't died
for her!" he heard himself think aloud. After all, life hadn't been
laughing behind his back, while he wrote the book for Barbara. Though
Fate snatched her away from him with one hand, with the other it gave
her back, irrevocably and forever. It seemed to Denin that, though
nothing could bring them together in body, nothing could ever separate
them in spirit.

When he wrote that same day, he assured her again, as he had assured
her in his cable, that she had a right to every one of the words of
comfort he had sent. "And you have a right to lean on that unseen wall
of love I told you about," he repeated. "It is close to you, and meant
to lean on. There can be no disloyalty to any one in resting against
it. The love that exists for you on the other side of the Great Sea is
too vast to be selfish. It asks nothing from you that you ought not to
give. It only begs you to be happy, for there's a kind of happiness
without which we fall out of tune with the universe. Don't say you can
have no happiness of any kind. Don't think it, or that it would be
'wrong' or light-minded to be happy if you could. You have seen life
draped in black. But black is a concentration of all colors. No opal
has such lights as a black opal. The great adventure of life is
learning the terror and the beauty and the splendor of it all as one
and inseparable.

"I have to confess that I'm no guide for you or any other. I am just
groping my way up, out of my own dark places; but I believe that great
secrets reveal themselves in flashes, just as--in some mysterious,
inspired moments--a sunrise or a sunset tells you the truth of a thing
you've been groping for years to find out. This obligation to your own
soul (and Heaven knows how many others), the obligation of
_happiness_--is one secret which has been opened for me by a magic key.
That key is my strong wish to be of use to you. It helps me to