"But what _would_ satisfy you? I often long to be that mummy you have in the Great Hospital, the one with the short nose and thick lips. When you looked at me spirit and flesh would grow one with delight, and I should come to life, and grow round and soft and warm again, and talk to you of Thebes, and you would be enchanted with me--you could not help it then. I should be so old, so very old, and genuine! "Dear, how I laugh at my fears now, or rather, how I bless them. If I had never known the horror of doubt, how could I have known what certainty is? And I did doubt you; I dare acknowledge it now. I wonder if you can understand what the shame of that doubt was? When I thought your absence and your silence were intentional slights, I knew how they felt when 'they called on the rocks to cover them, and I wished--oh, _how_ I wished!--that a thousand years had passed, and my spirit could be at the place where we met, and see the pillars broken, and. the ivy climbing over the ruins, and the lizards at home amongst them, and the shameless sunlight making bare the spot where we stood. "It was as if I had been punished for some awful unknown sin, and when I seemed to be dying, and I dared not write to you, and all hope of ever knowing the truth had departed, I used to exclaim in my misery: 'Verily, Lord, if Thy servant sinned she hath suffered! for the anguish of death has been doubled, and the punishment of the lost has begun while yet the tortured mind can make its lament and moan with the tortured body!' "But all that bitter past only enhances the present. "I wonder where you will be to-day. I believe you are always in that room of yours. You only leave it to walk to the station with me, after which you go back to it, and work there till it is dark; and then you rest, waiting for the daylight, and when it comes you go to work again. I cannot fancy you anywhere else. I should not like to realise that you have an existence of which I can know nothing, a life through which I cannot follow you, even in imagination. "But sometimes you come to me, and then how glad I am! You come to me and kiss me, and it is night and I am dreaming, and not ashamed.