Love must to school to learn his alphabet,  
His wings are shorn, his eyes are dim and wet.
 
He pores on books that once he knew by heart—
 
Poor, foolish Love, to wander and forget.
 
Elizabeth sat quite motionless for half an hour. Then she stirred, her head for a moment, whilst she listened to David’s regular breathing, and then rose to her feet. She passed through the open door into her own room, and undressed in the dark. Then she lay down and slept.
 
Three times during the night she woke and listened. But David still slept. When she woke up for the third time, the room was full of the greyness of the dawn. She got up and closed the door between the two rooms.
 
Then she lay waking. It had been a strange wedding night.
 
The day dawned cloudy, but broke at noon into a cloudless warmth that was more like June than April.
 
“Take me down the river,” said Elizabeth, and they rowed down for half a mile, and turned the boat into a water-lane where budding swept down on either side, and brushed the stream.
 
David was very well content to lie in the sun. The strain was gone from him, leaving behind it a weariness beyond words. Every limb, every muscle, every nerve was relaxed. There was a great peace upon him. The air tasted sweet. The light was a pleasant thing. The sky was blue, and so was Elizabeth’s dress, and Elizabeth was a very person. She did not fidget and she did not . When she it was of pleasant things.
 
David recalled a day, ten years ago, when he had sat with her in this very place. He could see himself, full of enthusiasm, full of youth. He could remember how he had talked, and how Elizabeth had listened. She was just the same now. It was he who had changed. Ten years ago seemed to him a very pleasant time, a very pleasant memory. Pictures rose before him—stray words—stray recollections running into a long, soft .
 
 
They came home in the dusk.
 
“Are you going to see Ronnie again?” said Elizabeth, as they landed.
 
“Yes; he couldn’t be doing better, but I’ll look in, and to-morrow Skeffington will go with me so as to get him broken in to the change. We ought to get away all right now.”
 
David waked next day to find the sun shining in at his uncurtained window. From where he lay he could see the young blue of the sky, and all the room seemed full of the sun’s gold. David lay in a lazy contentment watching the that danced in a long shining beam. There was a new stir of life in his . He stretched out his limbs and was glad of their strength. The sweetness and the glory and the promise of the spring slid into his blood and fired it.
 
“Mary,” he said, still between sleeping and waking—and with the name, memory woke. Suddenly his brain was very clear. He looked straight ahead and saw the door that led into the other room—the room that had been his mother’s. Elizabeth was in that room. He had married Elizabeth—she was his wife. He lay quite still and stared at the door. Elizabeth Chantrey was Elizabeth Blake. She was his wife—and Mary——
 
A sudden of laughter caught David by the throat. Mary was what she had promised to be—his sister; Mary was his sister. The spasm of laughter passed, and with it the stir in David’s blood. He was quite cool now. He lay staring at that closed door, and faced the situation.
 
It was a damnable situation, he . He felt as a man might feel who wakes from the of weeks, to find that in his madness he has done some intolerable, some irrevocable thing. A man who does not sleep is a man who is not wholly . David looked back and followed the events of the last few months with a critical detachment.
 
He saw the strain growing and growing until, in the end, on the of the abyss, he had snatched at the relief which Elizabeth offered, as a man who dies of thirst will snatch at water. Well—he had taken Elizabeth’s of water, his thirst was , he was his own man again. No, never his own man any more. Never free ............