She has insisted
of late that you would soon be coming home."
An hour later she came down into the library again. She had
removed the traces of travel, and she had travelled slowly and was
not tired. All this enabled him to see how changed she was; and
without looking older, how strangely oldened and grown how quiet of
spirit. She had now indeed become sister for him to those images
of beauty that were always haunting him--those far, dim images of
the girlhood of her sex, with their faces turned away from the sun
and their eyes looking downward, pensive in shadow, too freighted
with thoughts of their brief fate and their immortality.
"I must have a long talk with you before I try to sleep. I must
empty my heart to you once."
He knew that she needed the relief, and that what she asked of him
during these hours would be silence.
"I have tried everything, and everything has failed. I have tried
absence, but absence has not separated me from him. I have tried
silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to
him. Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can. It
is more than will or purpose, it is my life. It is more than life
to me, it is love."
She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress
very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back
to that one beginning.
"It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried
that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes.
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