"Then you have noticed how he watches and follows?"

"He is always like that. Always, since."

His "since" was one of the strangest syllables that ever came to my
ears. It implied nothing to follow. It was finality's self.

"It is"--I sought a word--"interesting and curious," I concluded lamely,
feeling how insufficient the word was.

"She comes back to him," said my host simply.

No need to ask of whom he spoke. The pronoun was as final and definitive
as his "since." Never have I heard such tenderness as he gave to its
utterance. Nor such desolation as dimmed his voice when he added:

"She never comes back to me."

That evening he spoke no more of her. Yet I felt that I had been
admitted to an intimacy. And, as the habit grew upon me thereafter of
dropping in to listen to the remote, restful, unworldly quaintnesses of
his philosophy, fragments, dropped here and there, built up the outline
of the tragedy which had left him stranded in our little backwater of
quiet. She whom he had cherished since they were boy and girl together,
had died in the previous winter. She had formed the whole circle of his
existence within which he moved, attended by Willy Woolly, happily
gathering his troves. Her death had left him not so much alone as alien
in the world. He was without companionship except that of Willy Woolly,
without interest except that of his timepieces, and without hope except
that of rejoining her. Once he emerged from a long spell of musing, to