Now let every joyous sound which the great globe can utter ring
forth in one burst of harmony! Is it not well done to make the
village-bells chant merrily when a marriage is over? Here in
London we can have no such music; but for us, my dear one, all
the roaring life of the great city is wedding-hymn. Sweet, pure
face under its bridal-veil! The face which shall, if fate spare
it, be as dear to me many a long year hence as now at the
culminating moment of my life!

As he trudged on in the dark, his tortured memory was living
through that time again. The images forced themselves upon him,
however much he tried to think of quite other things--of some
fictitious story on which he might set to work. In the case of
his earlier books he had waited quietly until some suggestive
'situation,' some group of congenial characters, came with sudden
delightfulness before his mind and urged him to write; but
nothing so spontaneous could now be hoped for. His brain was too
weary with months of fruitless, harassing endeavour; moreover, he
was trying to devise a 'plot,' the kind of literary
Jack-in-the-box which might excite interest in the mass of
readers, and this was alien to the natural working of his
imagination. He suffered the torments of nightmare--an oppression
of the brain and heart which must soon be intolerable.



CHAPTER VI. THE PRACTICAL FRIEND

When her husband had set forth, Amy seated herself in the study
and took up a new library volume as if to read. But she had no