for the next half-hour began a sentence without this formula.
It was as if they sought to use it as a master-word wherewith to
reanimate the happinesses and sorrows of their common past, and as if
they found the charm was potent to awaken the thin, powerless ghosts of
emotions that were once despotic. For it was as if frail shadows and
half-caught echoes were all they could evoke, it seemed to Charteris;
and yet these shadows trooped with a wild grace, and the echoes
thrilled him with the sweet and piercing surprise of a bird's call at
midnight or of a bugle heard in prison.

Then twelve o'clock was heralded by the College bell, and Pauline arose
as though this equable deep-throated interruption of the music's levity
had been a signal. John Charteris saw her clearly now; and she was
beautiful.

"I must go. You will not ever quite forget me, Jack. Such is my sorry
comfort." It seemed to Charteris that she smiled as in mockery, and
yet it was a very tender sort of derision. "Yes, you have made your
books. You have done what you most desired to do. You have got all
from life that you have asked of life. Oh, yes, you have got much from
life. One prize, though, Jack, you missed."

He, too, had risen, quiet and perfectly sure of himself. "I haven't
missed it. For you love me."

This widened her eyes. "Did I not always love you, Jack? Yes, even
when you went away forever, and there were no letters, and the days
were long. Yes, even knowing you, I loved you, John Charteris."

"Oh, I was wrong, all wrong," he cried; "and yet there is something to
be said upon the other side, as always. . . ." Now Charteris was still
for a while. The little man's chin was uplifted so that it was toward
the stars he looked rather than at Pauline Romeyne, and when he spoke
he seemed to meditate aloud. "I was born, I think, with the desire to
make beautiful books--brave books that would preserve the glories of
the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people,
and re-awaken joy and magnanimity." Here he laughed, a little
ruefully. "No, I do not think I can explain this obsession to any one
who has never suffered from it. But I have never in my life permitted
anything to stand in the way of my fulfilling this desire to serve the
Dream by re-creating it for others with picked words, and that has cost
me something. Yes, the Dream is an exacting master. My books, such as
they are, have been made what they ar