“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss----” She learnt to know so well that they haunted her thoughts like music, the sonnets of Shakespeare, and the lyrics of all the “singing birds,” Lodge and Peele and Nash, Ben Jonson and Campion, who, a musician in every sense of the word, framed his “Ayres for one voyce with the Lute or Violl,” so as “to couple words and notes lovingly together.” She came to Milton, and the lighter poets of the Restoration, of whom her love was given chiefly to Herrick. The poets of comparatively modern times followed, and led her in due time to Keats and Shelley, who revealed to her the modern note of unrest, and the troubling effect on the human spirit, of beauty, whether revealed as to Keats in the material world, or as to Shelley in the intangible world of ideas. With these two poets, the library, formed in her old friend’s youth, paused abruptly in its representations of English poetry. Anne found no volume of Browning, nor of Tennyson, on the shelves. In her friend’s day they were young, untried men, as in a still greater degree, were Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith. But without them, Anne, like Keats, had travelled in the realms of gold, and the new planet that swam into her ken was the very world in which for thirty years she had lived blind and a prisoner, ignorant of its beauty, deaf to its calling voices. It was of her five years of solitary reading that Anne was thinking as she sat in the September sunshine with François’s letter open on her lap. She had read, she had thought. Imaginatively, she had entered into the life of the great world outside her country home. But of actual individual experience of one personal heart-beat, known to thousands of men and women past and present, she was as ignorant at thirty-five as she had been all through her quiet existence. Like the Lady of Shalott, she sat weaving her tapestry of dreams before a magic mirror in which the pageant of the world was nothing but a reflection; a shadow-dance of figures, loving, hating, struggling; pursuing brave adventures, triumphing or defeated, hopeful or despairing. Miss Page folded her letter, and replaced it slowly in its envelope. It was the day for her class of village children, whom she taught to sew, and to whom, while they wrestled with long seams, she read fairy tales. There was tea in the garden afterwards, and she had forgotten to tell Burks to put out the strawberry jam. She rose, and went into the house to repair the omission. VII “We shall have a very dull winter,” complained Mrs. Carfax, “with so many of you away. Sylvia and Mrs. Dakin have gone already, and now you are going to desert us. We shall feel quite lost.” It was a damp afternoon in mid-October, and the wood-fire in Miss Page’s drawing-room glowed cheerfully.