ever before.

The closely-written sheets dropped from my hand on to my knee. "Ah, my
own little girl," I thought, "who wouldn't miss you--sadly, yes,
terribly? Your delightful presence, the truth and honour that seem to be
manifest in your smallest gesture, in every glance from your clear eyes;
the companionship of your fearless intellect cutting through
conventionalities like a knife, arriving at the right point with the
unerring instinct of a woman, yet with the _naivete_ of a child."

Memories crowded in upon me, memories of all my happy days with Dulcie
in the country--in the hunting field, in the gardens about her home, of
afternoons spent among the books and prints and pictures in her father's
quiet, book-lined library at Holt, of the evenings in the drawing-room
at the piano, of hours of pleasant talk in the beautiful conservatories
and on the grassy terraces, and by the lake-side below the tennis lawn.
What, I thought, would life be like when at last I had her always with
me, brightening my life, filling my own home--our home--with laughter
and with the music of her voice! Again and again she rose to my
enthralled vision, and ever she was Youth and Love, the vision crowned
with the wonder of her nebulous, brown-gold hair as she gazed at me out
of her sweet, clear eyes in which I seemed still to read unfathomable
purity and truth.

It is a terrible thing to be in love. Some savage races there are which
hold to the belief that the spirits of lovers changing places, give rise
to the feverish mental upheaval which we prosaically term "falling in
love," the spirits being restless at their enforced imprisonment and
unsatisfied until they have returned each to its appointed sphere. Now
that I have recovered from the affliction I sometimes wonder if it might