wore a red woollen fisherman's cap that hung down
behind over the waving masses of her long, thick yellow hair--a blue
jersey of the elaborate kind women knit on the Whitby quay--a short,
striped petticoat like a Boulogne fishwife's, and light brown
stockings on her long, thin legs.

I have a photograph of her like that, holding a shrimping-net; with
a magnifying-glass, I can see the little high-light in the middle of
each jet-black eye--and every detail and charm and perfection of her
childish face. Of all the art-treasures I've amassed in my long
life, that is to me the most beautiful, far and away--but I can't
look at it yet for more than a second at a time....

"O tempo passato, perche non ritorni?"

As Mary is so fond of singing to me sometimes, when she thinks I've
got the blues. As if I haven't always got the blues!

All Barty's teaching is thrown away on me, now that he's not here
himself to point his moral--

"Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deca, dela,
Pareil a la
Feuille morte...."

Heaven bless thee, Mary dear, rossignolet de mon ame! Would thou
wert ever by my side! fain would I keep thee for myself in a golden
cage, and feed thee on the tongues of other nightingales, so thou
mightst warble every day, and all day long. By some strange
congenital mystery the native tuning of thy voice is such, for me,
that all the pleasure of my past years seems to go forever ringing
in every single note. Thy dear mother speaks again, thy gay young
father rollicks and jokes and sings, and little Marty laughs her
happy laugh.

_Da capo, e da capo_, Mary--only at night shouldst thou cease from
thy sweet pipings, that I might smoke myself to sleep, and dream
that all is once more as it used to be.

* * * * *

The writing, such as it is, of this life of Barty Josselin--which
always means the writing of so much of my own--has been to me, up to
the present moment, a great source of consolation, almost of
delight, when the pen was in my hand and I dived into the past.

But now the story becomes such a record of my own personal grief
that I have scarcely the courage to go on; I will get through it as
quickly as I can.

It was at the beginning of the present decade that the bitter thing
arose--medio de fonte leporum; just as all seemed so happy and
secure at Marsfield.

One afternoon in May I arrived at the house, and nobody