my notes after the signature, "I
love you, I love you." And she was even more restrained. Such little
phrases as "Dear Stevenage"--that was one of her odd names for me--"I
wish you were here," or "Dear, _dear_ Stevenage," were epistolary
events, and I would re-read the blessed wonderful outbreak a hundred
times....

Our separation lengthened. There was a queer detached unexpected
meeting in London in December, for some afternoon gathering. I was shy
and the more disconcerted because she was in winter town clothes that
made her seem strange and changed. Then came the devastating intimation
that all through the next summer the Ladislaws were to be in Scotland.

I did my boyish utmost to get to Scotland. They were at Lankart near
Invermoriston, and the nearest thing I could contrive was to join a
reading party in Skye, a reading party of older men who manifestly had
no great desire for me. For more than a year we never met at all, and
all sorts of new things happened to us both. I perceived they happened
to me, but I did not think they happened to her. Of course we changed.
Of course in a measure and relatively we forgot. Of course there were
weeks when we never thought of each other at all. Then would come phases
of hunger. I remember a little note of hers. "Oh Stevenage," it was
scrawled, "perhaps next Easter!" Next Easter was an aching desolation.
The blinds of Burnmore House remained drawn; the place was empty except
for three old servants on board-wages. The Christians went instead to
the Canary Isles, following some occult impulse of Lady Ladislaw's. Lord
Ladislaw spent the winter in Italy.

What an empty useless beauty the great Park possessed during those
seasons of intermission! There were a score of places in it we had made
our own....

Her letters to Oxford would cease for weeks, and suddenly revive and
become frequent. Now and then would come a love-letter that seemed to
shine like stars as I read it; for the most part they were low-pitched,
friendly or humorous letters in a roundish girlish writing that was
maturing into a squarely characteristic hand. My letters to her too I
suppose varied as greatly. We began to be used to living so apart. There
were weeks of silence....

Yet always when I thought of my life as a whole, Mary ruled it. With her
alone I had talked of my possible work and purpose; to her alone had I
confessed to ambitions beyond such modest worthiness as a public school
drills us to affe