There was another strain of feeling, which developed now, or came to the surface. As I drank my morning coffee and smoked a cigar, my memory traveled back through my acquaintance with her—back through my intercourse with her at Ste. Maxime, with all its revelation of her doings, feelings, and personality; back through all that to the first days at Cragsfoot which seemed now so long ago, on the other side of the barrier which her flight had raised and the war had made complete. It was Arsenio who had set me on the line of thought. I recalled my mood in those days, the state of mind in which I had been, and saw how justly his quick wits had then divined it and had yesterday described it. I had chosen to play the fogy, to consider myself out of the running. It was quite true. He had paid me the compliment of saying that he did not know why I should have done this. He did not know. I do not think that I knew myself at the time. We see our feelings most clearly when they possess us no longer. The woman who had been more than any one else in the world to me was still alive in my heart in those days, and still mistress of my thoughts, though she walked the earth no longer and her voice was forever silent. It was still seeming to me, as it does to a man in such a case, that my story was told and finished, that I was done. Beside the fresh young folk at Cragsfoot, I might well feel myself a fogy. What could Lucinda seem to me then but a charming child playing with her fellows? If Arsenio’s words set me thus smiling—even if half in melancholy over a vanished image that rose again from the past, and flitted transiently across a stage that she had once filled—smiling at the memory of how old—how “finished” for affairs of the heart—I had once seemed to myself, there was a danger that they might make me forget how old I was, in sad fact, at the present moment.