which never
dies out of ears attuned to the music of destiny ... Love you less, you
who are the source of all joy to me? Evelyn, my heart aches and my brain
is light with grief, but the terrible certitude persists that we are
being drawn asunder. I see you like a ship that has cleared the harbour
bar, and is already amid the tumult of the ocean.... We are ships, and
the destiny of ships is the ocean, the ocean draws us both: we have
rested as long as may be, we have delayed our departure, but the tide
has lifted us from our moorings. With an agonised heart I watched the
sails of your ship go up, and now I see that mine, too, are going aloft,
hoisted by invisible hands. I look back upon the bright days and quiet
nights we have rested in this tranquil harbour. Like ships that have
rested a while in a casual harbour, blown hither by storms, we part,
drawn apart by the eternal magnetism of the sea. I would go to you,
Evelyn, if I could, and pray you not to leave me. But you would not
hear: destiny hears no prayers. In the depths of our consciousness,
below the misery of the moment, there lies a certain sense that our ways
are different ways, and that we must fare forth alone, whither we know
not, over the ocean's rim; and in this sense of destiny we must find
comfort. Will resignation, which is the highest comfort, come to us in
time? My eyes fall upon my music paper, and at the same time your eyes
turn to the crucifix. Ours is the same adventure, though a different
breeze fills the sails, though the prows are set to a different horizon.
God is our quest--you seek him in dogma, I in art.

"But, Evelyn, my heart is aching so. How awful the word never, and the
years are filled with its echoes. And the wide ocean which lies outside
the harbour is so lonely, and I have no heart for any other joy. 'May we
not meet again?' my heart cries from time to time; 'may not some
propitious storm blow us to the same anchorage again, into the same
port?' Ah, the suns and the seas we shall have sailed through would
render us unrecognisable, we should not know each other. Last night I
wandered by the quays, and, watching the constellations, I asked if we
were divided for ever, if, when the earth has become part and parcel of
the stars, our love will not reappear in some starry affinity, in some
stellar friendship.--Yours,

"ULICK DEAN."

The symbol of the ships seemed to Evelyn to express the union and the
division and the destiny that ha