I always felt you alone. I seemed to know your voice after centuries. Yes, I am sure it was that which affected me so deeply in your work and made me answer your letters with such faith. _I knew your voice._ I thought of you alone--your spirit hungry.... It makes one feel so common, when one's intuitions betray this way. The heart for writing further is cold and heavy. Once, down the wind, came a fragrant pollen, but the blowing summer is gone from my garden.... No signature. She had not penned a skylark with a folded or broken wing. Charter sat thinking for several moments, but only because he knew there was ample time to catch the noon-train for New York. That he should do this had formed in mind before he had read five lines of the letter. This thought of action steadied him; and the proof that he had sensed her agony and reflected it throughout the past forty-eight hours made the call of the East instant and irresistible. It did not come to him at first that he was now entering the greater conflict, for which Nature had trained him in tranquillity and fed his soul unto replenishment during three years.... His first quick thought came out of old habits of mind: _An hour with her, and her heart will be healed!_ Here was the old trifler. He suffered for this instant faltering of the brighter manhood. Man's fineness is not accentuated by the fact that a woman sacrifices her power within him, when she falls to pleading a little. Charter could have torn out the old mental fibres upon which played the thought of her swiftly renewed happiness by his presence. The reality of her suffering slowly penetrated his mind. He perceived that she could not express the actuality; that her thoughts had winged ineffectually about the immovable disorder--like bees over the clumsy corpse of a rodent in the hive. It was not to be lifted, and the inspiration hermetically to seal the monster and resume activities as well as possible, had not yet come.... "I might have endured it, if _you_ had told me!" He wasted no energy trying to think exactly what had happened. It was all he could bear to grasp the full meaning that this inspiring creature who had soared and sung so long, was crushed and cold. Every sentence in her letter revealed the bruise of her heart, the absence of spontaneity.... She was as different from other women he had known--the women who had been healed by his word or his caress--as he was different in this attraction. He telegraphed that he was coming, begged that she would see him the following evening, and instructed her to leave word for him at the _Granville_. Then he packed his bag and told his mother. She laughed quietly. "On the spur of the moment as usual, Quentin.... It will be good for you. You've been home a long time. Are you going--beyond New York?" "I haven't a thought now of going farther, Mother," he answered....