‘I want you to say you forgive me,’ she said. ‘The priest--he said I ought to ask your forgiveness.’ Lucian bowed his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I forgive all you wish. Try not to think of it any more.’ He was saying over and over to himself that she was still disordered of mind, that the sin she was confessing was imaginary; but deeper than his insistence on this lay a dull consciousness that he was hearing the truth. He stood watching her curiously. She suddenly looked up at him, and he saw a strange gleam in her eyes. ‘After all,’ she said, half spitefully, ‘you came between him and me at the beginning.’ Lucian never saw his wife again. A month later she was dead. All the time of the burial service he was thinking that it would have been far better if she had never recovered her reason. For two years he had cherished a dream of her that had assumed tender and pathetic tones. It had become a part of him; the ugly reality of the last grim moments of her life stood out in violent contrast to its gentleness and softness. When the earth was thrown upon the coffin, he was wondering at the wide difference which exists between the real and the unreal, and whether the man is most truly blessed who walks amongst stern verities or dreams amidst the poppy-beds of illusion. One thing was certain: the face of truth was not always beautiful, nor her voice always soothing to the ear. CHAPTER XXX After Haidee’s death Lucian left Paris, and during the rest of the spring and summer of that year went wandering hither and thither about Europe. His mind was at this time in a state of quiescence; he lounged from one place to another, faintly interested and lazily amused. He was beginning to be a little bored by life, and a little tempted to drift with its stream. It was in this frame of mind that he returned to London in the following autumn. There, soon after his return, he sprang into unwonted activity.