and that
life. I want to live in my music, in the heaven of Ideas, as I do now.
And to you I want always to be the vision, the dream, the spirit of
your thoughts: never the wife, the mother, the keeper of the
household, occupied with worldly matters."

And I had promised with all the rapture and the fervour of one who
understood and thought her thoughts, and who had always longed to
escape from the commonplace, the trivial matters of the world, to
whom, as to her, the deathless amaranth flowers of beauty, of art, of
Idea, of inspiration were all.

But the promise had been broken. Through me she had known pain,
suffering, danger, inability to work, anxiety, daily care for months
and months alone. The exquisite, perfect form I had counted so sacred,
had suffered the common earthly lot. And through me. My thoughts
seemed crushing me, grinding me beneath them, but at last her voice
penetrated to my brain, through its anguish of self-reproach.

"I knew you would feel it so much, dear Trevor, that was why I kept it
secret from you and went away, but now it is all over and past, you
must not dwell on it. It is irrevocable. Don't reproach yourself about
it. Let us be glad we are in Heaven now."

I rose and went over to her and knelt by the couch, raising one of her
hands to my lips and holding it against me.

"Dear! Dearest one! You went away to endure all that misery alone, so
that it should not distress me? How wonderfully unselfish you have
always been to me!"

"Oh, no," she answered quickly, a light colour rising all over her
face.

"You must not think that. I went away for myself, too. I could not
bear that you should see me disfigured, spoiled, as you would think. I
had always been the ideal to you. I could not bear to let you see me
as an ordinary woman. I was afraid I should lose your passion for me,
which I value more than anything else in the world. I felt I could
face everything but that. Terrifying and horrible as it all was to
meet quite alone, still it was better than feeling I was losing your
love and desire."

"But you would not have done," I said vehemently; "nothing could make
any difference to my love for you."

"Not to your love, perhaps, but our passions are not in our own
control. They rise under certain influences, sink and decline under
others, and we can do nothing. We must look these things in the face.
See now, if I were suddenly turned to an old, old woman, withered
before your eyes, wo