Perhaps there will never be any more inns, with anybody, in my life. Enchantment has vanished from the world. Perhaps it will never come back, save in memory. Perhaps I shared with you the last gleam I shall have of it. JUDITH. 4 Martin’s mother answered, in a large, old-fashioned feminine handwriting, by return of post. Dear Judith, Of course I remember you. I do not forget pretty and charming people with sweet voices; and as a friend of Martin’s you are dear to me, as all his friends are, because they were responsible for so much of his happiness. It was kind of you to write. I miss my darling boy every moment of the day. Never was a better son born. But he would not have wished me to grieve, and so I try not to. He is in God’s keeping and I feel him very near to me; please God there will not be many years in store for me before he and I and his dear father are reunited. It is a great comfort to think how happy his life was. His nature was all sun, and from his birth till the day he was taken from us I verily believe not a cloud came over him. Should not that console us? Thank you again, dear Judith, and believe that Martin’s mother remembers you affectionately. ELEANOR FYFE. “Not a cloud came over him.” She would believe that and smile, ageing, stricken, lonely as she was, till her life’s end. Perhaps after all it was so. Perhaps he had not allowed one woman’s petty favours and denials to make a shadow across the large and perpetual sunshine of his way. How little, after all, they had been together, how few words exchanged; how insignificant a figure she must have been, when all was said and done, among all the figures in his thousands of days! Slowly, the darkness was lifting. Soon now, Jennifer’s letter must come, and a new beginning dawn out of this end of all things. 5 It came, one morning when the first gale had started to sweep in upon the season’s painted picture; a day when lights, shadows, leaves and wings of birds moved, flew, shone, flickered, paused in a restless harmony. Darling, Something makes me write to you now. I have often nearly started and then given it up, but now it feels as if I must, it feels rather like an evening that perhaps you don’t remember but I do, when I _had_ to come and see you after not having been able to for ages--that time you were ill.