hour of mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more
exquisite renewal of their earlier meetings. His waking thought
was that he must see her again; and as consciousness affirmed
itself he felt an intense fear of losing the sense of her
nearness. But she was still close to him; her presence remained
the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working
hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident
of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of
a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth
has plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most
trivial detail had its significance, and the rapture of recovery
was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had
missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was
irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was
passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his
loss. It was as though she had bought him with her blood. . . .

That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed
her to the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding
her; he was hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words
they lapsed into silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the
fire. It was not that he was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a
curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he was always
forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence, through
which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous
as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--

Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed
to be looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she
wanted.