Well, we can at least say this--that its perfume is still upon the air, its real gift to us and our great and permanent possession. It may be easier for us--his mere friends--to declare thus that we haven't really lost him. But given a little time it will become possible even to you, who were heart of his heart. And if there's no older--and perhaps colder--truism than this, yet it has a very sound and, I believe, an actually physical basis. For if we grant, as we needs must, that the material body is ever changing, cell replacing cell by a continuous process of wasting and repair, so that the substance containing us to-day is by no means identical with that which contained us, as it were, yesterday, why then the cells that called out for the physical sight and touch of those other cells that surrounded him we loved must necessarily pass also upon their journey, and with them, to a very great extent, their anguish of unsatisfied desire. This is why, I think, nothing becomes more absolutely obliterated than a dead passion that has been merely bodily; and why also, in most other cases where passion has been a factor, the diminution of grief must be regarded as a completely natural process and one that implies no shadow of disloyalty. It merely means that the sense of loss has been transferred to another and more spiritual plane, where, lo! it even appears at times to have been scarcely a loss at all; but instead a withdrawal, so obviously transient as to be itself an evidence of some certain, if incomprehensible reunion. With his memories so thronging, with the visible and abiding evidences of his activities so implicit in the growth of his successors, how little, after all, has become the value of the vessel that contained him! Am I right? Isn't it going with you somehow in this fashion? But, dear me, if your power of sleep were not returning to you so rapidly, you would be imagining this some subtle form of prescription by epistle. And that was one of the best bits of news in your letter, besides being the chief reason why you mustn't, I think, come back to town just yet, even at the risk of disappointing Hilary and Norah. For Sleep's a fickle goddess when she once goes wandering, and the way to woo her home is not to woo her at all. Seek her not, and she will come stealing back to you round the corner to know the reason why. And there's no place like the country and some quiet garden therein in which to declare your war of independence.