er at the things that had happened to her, and for
long spaces we did not talk at all nor feel the need of talking, and
what seems very strange to me now, seeing that we had been impassioned
lovers, we never kissed; we never kissed at all; I do not even remember
that I thought of kissing her. We had a shyness between us that kept us
a little apart, and I cannot remember that we ever touched one another
except that for a time she took me and led me by the hand towards a
little place of starry flowers that had drawn her eyes and which she
wished me to see. Already for us two our bodies were dead and gone. We
were shy, shy of any contact, we were a little afraid of one another,
there was a kind of awe between us that we had met again.

And in that strange and beautiful place her fancy that we were dead
together had a fitness that I cannot possibly convey to you. I cannot
give you by any writing the light and the sweet freshness of that high
desolation. You would need to go there. What was lovely in our talk,
being said in that setting, would seem but a rambling discourse were I
to write it down,--as I believe that even now I could write it
down--word for word almost, every thought of it, so fresh does it remain
with me....

My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to
tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two
years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together
there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were
little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....

Sec. 5

It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the
meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed
slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....

Little we knew to what it was we rowed.

As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly
into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a
little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a
little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it's
done."

"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It's just as if--when I
was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and
despaired altogether,--some power had said, 'Have you forgotten the
friendship I gave you?' ... But we shall have had our time. We've
met,--we've seen one another, we've heard one another. We'v