“If you still love me,” she said brokenly, “it is your right to take me, whatever seems to hinder.” She held forth her hands, but without looking up. “Your voice is the highest leading that I know. Oh, are you not strong enough? Can you not bend me to your will?” A sob stayed her, but there came another cry: “If I were young!” Kingcote quivered, then fell to his knees, holding the hands she had outstretched. “Say good-bye to me in the kind voice I once knew!” He spoke in hoarse, choked accents. “Say it kindly, that it may be a sacred memory whilst I live, and a hope in death!” She did utter the word, but in such a passion of weeping that it fell upon his ears like a moan. Then he kissed both her hands, and broke away.... “The tragedy,” Kingcote had once said, “is not where two who love each other die for the sake of their love; but where love itself dies, blown upon by the cold breath of the world, and those who loved live on with hearts made sepulchres.”... Here is a letter which came to Kingcote from Mr. Vissian some six months later: “Methinks, my friend, I have grounds of complaint against you. Though I have submitted to your judgment three conjectural emendations which, in my poor thinking, do not lack propriety, you fail even to acknowledge the receipt of them. I trust this does not signify any incapacity to write; for you are of those whom I would rather challenge for unkindness than pity for mischance. I should--taking the more probable view of the case--scarcely have written again thus soon, but that I have sundry items of news to communicate, one of which concerns me nearly. Learn, then, that at the end of the year I surrender my present living, on the ground that another and a better has been offered me. When I say ‘better,’ I mean in the worldly sense; that, I fear, my usual way of speaking will have made you too ready to take for granted. I shall in future be nearer to you by a matter of fifty miles, my new parish being that of S----------. “There will be a necessity for keeping a curate, as the work is much more considerable than what has here been my share. It is in no spirit of levity that I express my hope of being able to adapt my energies to the larger sphere. It is possible that I have occasionally been remiss, owing to the manifold temptations of pursuits which my graver judgment often condemns as incompatible with my duties.