When the service was over, I waited by the west front watching the congregation stream out of the gray gloom inside into the primrose-coloured lights of sunset. There were two big collies sitting patiently side by side on the edge of the grass, looking with liquid, eager eyes at the people coming out. Suddenly two tails began to thump ecstatically, but neither dog moved. It was She—I think I knew from their eagerness it could be none else. With a smile lurking in her eyes, she walked to them, and from where I was I could hear her say, ‘Dear angels! come along,’ and two tawny streaks fled over the grass.

I waited a little, then followed her. She turned southwards out of the Close, over the bridge, below which the big trout lie, and into the path through the water-meadows, the two tawny streaks cutting{254} figures like a swallow’s flight up and down the road, running at top speed just for the joy of the life that was in them. And once clear of the town, she looked furtively round, saw only one wayfarer a hundred yards behind, and ran too. The wayfarer quickened his pace, ready to drop into a sedate walk if she looked round. Then on the edge of the water she found a stick, and, whistling to the dogs, threw it clean across the river, and a double plunge and splash of flying spray followed it. Then the streaks swam back, each holding an end of the beloved stick, dropped it at her feet, and, one on each side of her, shook themselves, so that she was between the waters, and I heard a faint scream of dismay and then a laugh. My house stands in the road close beyond the end of the meadows, but she went on, and still I followed, past the group of labourers’ cottages, where lights were already springing up beneath the dark thatch, and out on to the main-road. And at that moment I guessed where she would go. Yes, to that house—no other—the house where Margery lived, the house which was the scene of my dark dreams in August last.{255} The collies rudely pushed their way in before her, after the manner of their impulsive kind, and the door was shut.

I was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually some fault to find with me. She had this evening.

‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’

‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been away.’

‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.

‘My dear lady, who are coming here to-night?’

Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.

This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn{256} down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.

‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a moment.’

So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment afterwards.

‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’

‘The most,’ said I; ‘but I know it well. There was a great friend of {257}mine who used to live here——’

She looked up suddenly.

‘Dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in South Africa? He was a distant cousin of mine.’

‘Then his wife was, too?’ said I.

‘Yes, I believe so. Why?’

‘It partly accounts for it.’

‘Accounts for what?’ she said.

‘That you are absolutely the living image of her.’

She laughed again.

‘Oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance of somebody’s. I shall have to live up to her. I do hope she wasn’t very nice. It will be so difficult for me if she was.’

‘She and Dick were the greatest friends I ever had,’ said I.

Those beautiful gray eyes grew serious.

‘Ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘It was all very sudden, was it not? The child, too!’

‘Yes, very sudden. I had been dining with her here, and she had gone upstairs when the telegram came. She heard the ring, and leaned{258} over the banisters above the hall, and knew. Then the child was born. She died just at day-break next morning. She asked me, I remember, to pull up the blind, and said, “Let in the morning.” That was all.’

‘Ah, poor thing—poor thing!’ she said. Then she looked up at me: ‘Poor thing!’ she repeated.

The tea was brought in, and before many minutes her father came in also. They are coming to lunch to-morrow.

That night I was out to dinner, but came home early and sat for a long time in front of the fire, with work calling on me to do it, but simply incapable. What a strange, inexplicable coincidence it all is! How I long for, and dread, and love, and fear, the thought of these days that are coming! Surely this is meant to mean something! Think of the millions of little events and decisions which have gone to make up this particular conjuncture. Is it possible that they were all done in haphazard? Or is it another teasing problem that has been set me on the curious chequer-board of life, ending in my checkmate? just a piece of ingenious man?uvring of the pieces, all leading to{259} nothing? I cannot believe that. Yet if it is not that, if love is the answer to it all....

I love to be with her, and since that afternoon in the cathedral I have thought of nothing but her. But love her? I know it is not that—yet. It is, that, by this curious trick which Nature has played, I feel—I am cheated into feeling—that Margery is here with me again. It is as if there had been made an image of Margery, like in every respect, not only in externals, in voice, appearance, gesture, but in the deeper things as well—in her gaiety, her tenderness, and in that quick sympathy which sprang into being at the moment the call was made. Yet God never makes facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none other’s. Or—the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night—is this some wraith of my Margery—Dick’s Margery—sent, God knows from where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? Was there in my love for Margery, after she was Dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept suggesting, ‘If this had been otherwise—if Dick died?’... Yes, there was that. Day after day there was that. I tried to fight it—indeed I tried.{260} But I did not conquer it for a whole year. But in June, on the last evening of all, when she spoke to me in the garden of the dear event that was coming, it dropped dead, or so I hoped and believed. Yet for a whole year I let it live: is God going to punish me for that by these cruel means? To make me love again, and again go hungry?

It cannot be; again and again I tell myself it cannot be. But so I told myself when the telegram of Dick’s death came, and in spite of all my telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out a word of it. But if once more I am to go unrequited, I do not see how I can bear it. It would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of Margery. At present I love seeing her, because—because that pressed and withered flower I always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. But Helen—I think I have not mentioned her name before—this incarnation of Margery, is also a living woman, with an identity of her own. How if from loving her of whom she so sweetly and poignantly reminds{261} me I pass to loving the woman herself? And if she does not care?

No, I will see her no more. My life is my own, and I will not risk that great stake again. I know the unutterable sweetness of loving. I know, too, the unutterable emptiness of love unrequited, even though from her who loved me not I had such a wealth of tender and womanly affection. I know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that are lovely and of good report. For two years, in spite of what went before, God knows how much happiness I have been allowed to enjoy, how rich I have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding music in all the strings of human emotions except one only—love, definite love for one woman. It is strange if I cannot be content without it. True, often and often I have felt, and shall feel again, that this would crown all the rest; but if I again do my part in it, let myself love this girl, and nothing comes of it, how well I know with what a sense of dejection and impotence I shall have to begin again from the beginning, picking up the scattered pieces of the structure known as ‘I,{262}’ fitting them together till some sort of coherent entity, a person of some ............