For over a year I was alone in the great empty chÂteau with my dreams.

I ate and slept, and took walks in the park and the country-lanes; I comforted the ever-shrivelling Countess; I read incessantly. But I did not live. The life of my soul was sometimes in the past, chiefly in the future, in the present not at all. By deliberate endeavour I made the present even less than it would have been, by encouraging myself to experience no emotion except in my dreamings, to take no interest in the small daily happenings (they were very small) of my Villebecq daily life, to remember that for me Life would begin at the moment when Vision and Reality became one. Till then the years were wasting. Time marked time. (Perhaps the real horror of Eternity—Time marking time for ever, with no Love beyond?)

In her reply to my birthday-letter Aunt Martha had omitted any reference to Robbie. It was a cruel disappointment. Probably she knew nothing, or had ignored or forgotten my query, thinking the postscript merely the casual after-thought it pretended to be, hardly calling for answer? Or perhaps, in a moment of intuition, such as might come even to Aunt Martha once in a way, she had divined the truth, and had deliberately omitted to reply?

After a while, the longing to get on the track of Robbie's this-world whereabouts—to hasten his Second Coming—became unbearable, and on Christmas Day 1869, being the Tenth Anniversary, I wrote to Aunt Martha again. I made the most of "A Happy New Year," and of the anxiety which I had for some months been beginning to feel as to my Grandmother's health and as to whether I ought not soon to be coming back to Devonshire once for all. Again, with beating heart, I penned the carefully thought-out afterthought. "By-the-way, I fancy I asked you once before, tho' can't remember your telling me anything on the point. Do you ever have news of Robert Grove who lived with you ten years ago, when I did? I sometimes think about him—he was a nice boy—and sometimes wonder where he is or what he may be doing?"

Was it by malice or accident that she consigned her barren response to the cry of my aching heart to a P.S. also? "You ask about Robert Grove: I have heard nothing of him for years. He must be a young man of 21 now."

Wretched woman! Well, I could wait no longer, I would go home and find him for myself. The main news in Aunt Martha's letter urged me to a like resolve:—"Mother and Aunt," she said, "are both ageing. Although Mother would never let you know it herself; also for fear of bringing to an end your life abroad, which she knows has been abundantly blessed to you—yet I know she would like you back."

I made up my mind at once—need for Robbie made the duty-call to my Grandmother's side clear and insistent—and told the weeping Countess within the hour.

Though her health was no better, Elise de Florian had at last decided to come home. When I wrote and told her I was returning to England, she replied that she would forward her plans and come back to Normandy at once. For the first few months after her departure she had ignored my existence except for formal courtesies in her infrequent letters to her mother. Then, suddenly, she had begun to write, and soon the letters were as friendly, as unhappy, and as passionate as the long talks in the old days together. I forgave her before I was half-way through the first letter, and had for some time been doing battle with Pride as to whether I should tell her how much I wanted to see her again.

She returned with Gabrielle one bitter January morning. I kissed her blue-pale forehead, and, as I gazed at the drawn ever-unloved face, felt for a moment bitterly ashamed of Love's triumphant futures that I hoped to garner in my own heart. That night I prayed God in His mercy to send her what her heart cried out for, knowing all the while that somehow God Himself could not grant my petition. I knew—understood physically—that Elise was a woman damned into the world to excite no supreme love in any heart; knew that if I were a man I could not love her, knew that God had given her life without power to win the one good this life can give.

Next morning she was too frail to rise. At first we were hopeful, and put everything down to the fatigues of the long journey. As day succeeded day, however, and she was each day wearier, neither we nor she could elude the truth the doctor was whispering: that Mademoiselle was in the last and rapid stages of a decline.

One night I was lying in bed reading by candle-light. The door softly opened. My heart stopped. She stood there in a long white night-gown, trembling in the cold air, bare-footed, ghastly pale. There was something in the eyes that awed me.

"I am dying now," she said. Her voice was low, melodious, and as though from far-away; from another place, another body, another soul. "Some one must kiss me once—love me once, properly, before I go. Will you, Mary?"

I had jumped out of bed. I wrapped my dressing-gown round her, and supporting her cold and tottering body led her back to her own room, and comforting her all the while got her back into bed, and slipped down gently beside her.

I pressed her tenderly to me and told her a dozen foolish times that she would soon be better.

"No"—she spoke in English as I did—"it is over. I wish it had been over long ago. I had a heart that could have loved the world, but no one loved me in return. I shall die a good Catholic, but religion has never given me comfort—never what it has given you. I loved my little sister: but it was all one-sided, and that is not Love at all. Love is when the getting and the giving are equal, when the two bodies change souls. There is only love. Poor little Suzanne, she could not help it. I could never have seen in her eyes what I longed for her to see in mine. Oh, the need for some one to love me; sometimes my poor heart could have burst. I was not wanted in the world. I was—not—wanted."

The sentences came oddly, disjointedly, further and further apart.

For some moments she had not spoken. Then, suddenly, her arms tightened round me in supreme yearning; she placed her lips hard upon mine in an embrace of ultimate passionate sadness; her body trembled violently, and then, in a swift second, was still.

The lips were cold. My arms were round a corpse. I freed myself, got up, lit a candle.

The old misery had for ever left her eyes, which were happy, and full of love. I closed them reverently, kissed each lid as I closed it, and went out to awaken the household.