* * * * * “Mildred,” I said. She sat down, and watched me. The pang across my eyes was sharper still. She arose again: took off her cape and sitting folded her hands in her lap. “Mildred----” What was the cause of this pang? Was she a disappointment to my eyes, that what they saw hurt knife-like? Oh, she is perfect fair. And yet I know, even before I have begun to speak, what is this knowledge pressing and cutting my eyes, which all her fairness, all my words unspoken shall not prevail against. “Mildred--Mildred.” I felt the need of touching her, as if to prove that she was there. I came to her and I knelt at her side, and I took her hand ... she let me take her hand ... and I pressed its palm against my brow. The pang is sharp, inside: her hand cannot reach it. I arose. And my words came as earnestly for me, as for herself. “Mildred, you know that I love you.” “Yes, John,” was her whisper. “You are all my life. When I saw you last, this was true and I knew it for true: and I said this to you. But, Mildred, I could not dream then how true it was, how true it was going to be.” Her eyes at once were darker and more bright, filling with her sympathy. She was thinking of my parents. “Not alone that,” I said. “Not alone that. Least of all that, dear Mildred. Everything is gone. I have left the world. I have irrevocably lost it. For a long time unknown to myself, I was preparing this. Even when last you saw me, and the time before ... that last time at your house, when Philip died ... I was, unknown to my feeble consciousness, slaying the world. And I am all alone. And it is all well lost. Not that I did not love it. But look, my darling, all of it I love, and all in it I love, has become you!” She accepted this as no new thing ... no new wonder. “You had become all in life that my life needed. And the rest was a husk ... to be cut ruthlessly out.” She withdrew her hand from mine. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked at me in a gesture of peace so far from my turmoiled state, that my eyes hurt, spanning the abyss between us.