his friend had laid on him in those last moments a heavy charge and had
expressed herself almost as handsomely as if she had listened
complacently to an assurance of his love. It was neither easy nor
delightful thoroughly to understand her; but little by little her
perfect meaning sank into his mind and soothed it with a sense of
opportunity which somehow stifled his sense of loss. For, to begin with,
she meant that she could love him in no degree or contingency, in no
imaginable future. This was absolute--he knew he could no more alter it
than he could pull down one of the constellations he lay gazing at
through his open window. He wondered to what it was, in the background
of her life, she had so dedicated herself. A conception of duty
unquenchable to the end? A love that no outrage could stifle? "Great
heaven!" he groaned; "is the world so rich in the purest pearls of
passion that such tenderness as that can be wasted for ever--poured away
without a sigh into bottomless darkness?" Had she, in spite of the
detestable present, some precious memory that still kept the door of
possibility open? Was she prepared to submit to everything and yet to
believe? Was it strength, was it weakness, was it a vulgar fear, was it
conviction, conscience, constancy?

Longmore sank back with a sigh and an oppressive feeling that it was
vain to guess at such a woman's motives. He only felt that those of this
one were buried deep in her soul and that they must be of the noblest,
must contain nothing base. He had his hard impression that endless
constancy was all her law--a constancy that still found a foothold among
crumbling ruins. "She has loved once," he said to himself as he rose and
wandered to his window; "and that's for ever. Yes, yes--if she loved
again she'd be COMMON!" He stood for a long time looking out into the
starlit silence of the town and forest and thinking of what life would
have been if his constancy had met her own in earlier days. But life was