"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to the unknown." "You might long to be back, if you could know. Think if you could see before you now, and recognise the woman who was once your wife." There was nettle-grasping in this. "It is a mere abstract idea," he replied, "unaccompanied by any image of an individual. I perceive that it is dutiful to recognise the fact that I should welcome her _if_ she appeared as a reality. But it is a large _if_. I am content to go on without an hypothesis--that is really all she is now. And my belief that, if she had ever existed, I should not be _able_ to disbelieve in her, underlies my acceptance of her in that character." Mrs. Nightingale laughed. "We are mighty metaphysical," said she. "Wouldn't it depend entirely on what she was like, when all's said and done? I believe I'm right. We women are more practical than men, after all." "You make game of my metaphysics, as you call them. Well, I'll drop the metaphysics and speak the honest truth." He stopped and faced round towards her, standing on the garden path. "Only, you must make me one promise." She stopped also, and stood looking full at him. "What promise?" "If I tell you all I think in my heart, you will not allow it to come between me and you, to undermine the only strong friendship I have in the world, the only one I know of." "It shall make no difference between us. You may trust me." They turned and walked again slowly, once up and down. Then Fenwick's voice, when he next spoke, had an added earnestness, a growing tension, with an echo in it, for her, of the years gone by--a ring of his young enthusiasm, of his passionate outburst in the lawn-tennis garden twenty years ago. He made no more ado of what he had to say.