just
beyond the edge of dreams with the garden spread around it and a lovely
wood before, she had never heard of it. There had been so many ways to
it once, paths to it began in pictures, great towered gates of music
gave upon its avenues, and if he had not spoken of it, it was because as
he had made himself believe when she did come, that Eunice Goodward
would come into it of first right. He could not have blamed her for not
wishing to live in it--from the first he had never blamed her. He might
have managed even had she pulled it about his ears to rebuild it in
some fashion, but this was the bitterest, that he knew now for a
certainty there had never been any House and the certainty made him
ridiculous.

It had been rather the worse that, with all the suddenness of this
discovery, he had not been able to avoid the habit of setting out for
it, seeking in dreams the relief of desolation in knowing that no dreams
could come. As often as he heard music or saw in the soft turn of a
cheek or the slender line of a wrist, what had moved him so in hers he
felt himself urged forward on old trails, only to be scared from them by
the apparition of himself as Eunice had evoked it from her bright
surpassing surfaces, as a man unaccomplished in passion, unprovocative.
All the gates to the House opened upon dreadful hollows of
self-despising into which Peter fell and floundered, so that he took to
going that way as little as possible, taking wide circuits about it
continually in the way of business, being rather pleased with himself
when at the end of two years he could no longer feel any pang of loss
nor any remembering thrill of what the House had been--until he
discovered that also he could not feel some other things, the pen
between his fingers and the rise of the stairs under him. He forgot
Eunice Goodward, and then one day he forgot to go home after office
hours, and they found him sitting still at his desk in the dark, trying
to remember whether he ought to put down the blotting-pad and the paper
weight on top of that, or if, on the whole, it were not better to put
the paper weight, as being the heavier article, first.

It was after that the doctor told him to go as far away from his
business as possible and keep on staying away.

"But if I am going to die, doctor," Peter carefully explained, "I would
much rather do it in my own country."

"Ah," the doctor warned him, "that's just the difficulty. You won't
die."

And t