"There is hope!" said one young man waggishly to another. "Cornie Rysbroek ought to see this." But Cornelius Rysbroek was traveling far away. As for Lawrence, he was slipping farther and farther into the past. There were times when without the aid of his picture Lilla could no longer visualize his face. Their moment of love became blurred in her memory. At times, remorsefully, as if struggling against a lethargy mysteriously imposed upon her natural instincts, she strove to revive her grief in its full strength; and then, for an instant, her recollections became as poignant as though he had been with her only yesterday. But that perception could not always be evoked at will; and ordinarily Lilla was aware only of a faint echo from a distant region of pathos and delight--an echo that reached her, through a host of other sounds, like the intrinsic spirit of an ultra-modern symphony, so wrapped up in dissonances as to be nearly unintelligible. "Where is he?" she wondered. "Are those right who would say that he has ceased to exist except in memory?" At this thought she wept, not for him so much as for the blurring of her remembrance of him. And sometimes, when she had not thought of him all day, she was awakened in the night by her own cry: "Give me back my love! Give me back my grief!" Rising from her bed, she pored over the books on spiritualism that still formed a long row on the shelf of her writing desk. She envied the women who were reported to have received, through automatic writing, messages from the dead. She sat down, in the silence of the night, to hold over the clean sheet of paper the perpendicular pencil. With her head bowed forward, her pose an epitome of patience, she fixed her eyes upon the pencil point, which slowly made meaningless curlicues. But suddenly, when she was expecting nothing, there passed through her a tingling warmth such as that which must pervade the earth at spring-time. She stared round the room with the thought, "His spirit is here!" And she uttered, very distinctly, in the hope that the words might penetrate his world from hers: "I love you as much as ever!" Those moments became rare. At last they ceased to occur. "He has passed so far into the beyond that he can no longer return to me." As if it had been awaiting this acknowledgment, a thicker curtain descended between Lilla and the past. And now she was like some medieval chatelaine who, emerging from a dark and lonely castle, views all the gewgaws that a far-wandering peddlar has spread out for her in the sun. There were the art galleries filled with statues in inchoate or tortured forms, or with paintings that seemed to Lilla to have been conceived by madmen, yet in which certain persons declared that they could discern a sanity beyond the understanding of the age. And there were the concert halls given over to the very newest music, from which Lilla emerged with her nerves exacerbated.