Since he could think of nothing else, he determined to make her his story. Gradually his purpose cleared and concentrated; his book should be a statement of what she meant to him--an idealized commentary from his point of view on what had happened. He would call it _The Book of Revelation_. It should be a sequel to _Life Till Twenty-One._ His first book had been the account of love’s dreaming; this should be his record of its realization. After the idea had fastened on him, he rarely stirred out He wrote enfevered. If his lips had failed to tell her, she should at last know what she meant to him. As he wrote, he lost all consciousness of the public; his book was addressed to her. Although he seemed to have lost her, he was perpetually recovering her. He re-found her in other men’s writings, in Keats’s love-letters to Fanny Brawne and particularly In _Maud_. “O that ’twere possible After long grief and pain To find the arms of my true love Round me once again.” He had never felt her arms about him, but such lines seemed the haunting echo of his own yearning. They gave tongue to the emotions which the dull ache of his heart had made voiceless. He recovered her in the dusty portrait of Vashti, which had lain in disgrace in the stable for so many years. Vashti’s youthful figure, listening in the Garden Enclosed, was very like Desire’s; the lips, which his boyish kiss had blurred, prophesied kindness. He brought it out from its place of hiding and hung it on the wall above his desk. He recovered her most poignantly in small ways: in the stubs of theatre-tickets for performances they had attended. When unpacking one of his trunks, he found some white hairs clinging to the sleeve of one of his coats. They set him dreaming of the pale, reluctant hands that had snuggled in the warmth of the white-fox muff. But he recovered her most effectually a week after his home-coming, when her letters began to arrive. Not that they were satisfactory letters; if they had been, they would not have been like her. Her sins as a correspondent were the same as her sins of conduct: they consisted of things omitted. Where she might have said something comforting, she filled up the sentence with dots and dashes. He begged her to confess that she was missing him. She escaped him. She let all his questions go unanswered. There was a come-and-find-me laughter in her way of writing. She would tell him just enough to make him anxious--no more. She had been to this play; she had danced at that supper; last Sunday she had automobiled with a jolly party out into the country. Of whom the jolly party had consisted she left him in ignorance.