Our very intimacy, so readily established as of its own accord--established, moreover, among such unlikely and half antagonistic elements--seemed to hint at a relationship resumed, instead of now first beginning. The fact that the three of us took so much for granted almost suggested memory. For the near presence of this woman--I call her woman, though she was but girl--disturbed me more than uncommonly; and this curious, soft delight I felt raging in the depths of me--whence did it come? Whence, too, the depth and power of other feelings that she roused in me, their reckless quality, their certainty, the haunting pang and charm that her face, not even pretty apart from its disfigurement, stirred in my inmost being? There was mischief and disaster in her sea-green eyes, though neither mischief nor disaster quite of this material world. I confessed--the first time for many years--to something moving beyond ordinary. More and more I longed to learn of her first meeting with the man she had married, and by what method he claimed to have recognised in this servant girl the particular ancient soul he waited for, and by what unerring instinct he had picked her out and set her upon so curious a throne. I watched the velvet band about the well-shaped neck.... “_I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore._ “_You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow’s soar Your neck turned so ... Some veil did fall--I knew it all of yore._” “And now,” she exclaimed, springing up and turning to her husband, “I’m going to leave you and the Professor together to talk out all your old things without me intervening! Besides I’ve got the bread to make,” she added with a swift, gay smile in my direction, “that bread you called delicious. I generally do it of a morning.” With a swinging motion of her lithe young body she was gone; the room seemed strangely empty; the disfiguring marks upon her girlish face were already forgotten; and a sense of companionship within me turned somehow lonely and bereft. CHAPTER XVIII TO MEMORY “_Yet, when I would command thee hence, Thou mockest at the vain pretence, Murmuring in mine ear a song Once loved, alas! forgotten long; And on my brow I feel a kiss That I would rather die than miss._”--Mary Coleridge. “Well?” Julius asked me, as we strolled across the pastures that skirted the main forest, “and does it seem anywhere familiar to you--the three of us together again? You recall--how much?” A rather wistful smile passed over his face, but the eyes were grave. He was in earnest if ever man was. “She doesn’t seem wholly a stranger to you?”