osts of people who have died. The ghosts of people
who have never been born. The people," he said, "who come through the
iron gate."

And as she looked at it again and at the untrodden grass behind it, she
felt that this masterpiece of iron tortured into beauty was an
appropriate symbol of their life. Of Owen's, rather than of hers. Closed
as it was to all corporeal creatures, there yet went through it
presences, intelligences, the august procession of the dreams.

It was flanked by a postern door, a little humble door in the wall of
the garden. That was the door, Laura said, through which her little
humble dreams would go out into the world to make their living.

"Poor Owen," she said, "it's the door _you'll_ have to go through."

He smiled.

"And the other," he said, "is the door I shall come back through when
I'm gone."

That was what she couldn't bear to think of, the necessity she laid on
him of going, as it were, for ever through the postern door. He was
after all such a supernatural, such a disembodied thing. He had at times
the eyes of a young divinity innocent of creation, untouched by the
shames and terrors of the apparent world. And she knew it was the desire
they had for each other that had brought him back from his divine
borders and that held him in her world. There were moments when she
felt that he maintained his appearance there by an effort so intense
that it must be torture.

And he would have to work for her, doing dreadful things down in Fleet
Street. Every day she would see him go down the green walk, and out
through the postern gate, into the alien and terrible places of the
incarnate. She felt that she had brought mortality upon an immortal
thing. She had bound this winged and radiant spirit with the weight of
her sad star.

But there came to her a wonderful day when he brought her home, through
the little humble door in the wall of the garden; when, shut in their
room, he took her to himself. He laid his hands on her shoulders, and
she closed her eyes. He bowed his head over her and his breath was on
her mouth and she gave her face to him. His hands trembled holding her,
and she felt upon her their power and their passion.

And she knew that it was not her body alone that he sought for and held,
but the soul that was her womanhood. It stood before him, a new-born
Eve, naked and unafraid on the green plots of Eden. It looked at him,
and its eyes were tender with desire and pity. It was