And on that night of all nights I could not but remember all. Sins I had committed; and though some might have called that a sin which I should have proclaimed in the face of heaven to have been a righteous act, that also I remembered.... It seemed, that night, to matter little that I was acquitted of one guilt when I had incurred a wrath by other guilts innumerable; it was from the whole body of an ancient death that I fainted to be delivered. My worldly ambition I knew to be not an empty boast; oh, might but this other rebirth of mine prove to be equally well founded! A rebirth--a white page for Evie and myself to write the story of our love upon--and even that spectre of her own life, of the dreadful coming of which this was in a sense the anniversary, would not have been an agony endured for nothing! Not all in vain would have been the grim discovery of that which, four years before, had hung from a hook in a bedroom door! Not all lost, not all lost, might but the morrow prove my second natal day! So, passionate and unresting, I prayed among my swags and emblems and gargoyles. The street-sweeper had long since gone; soon would come a lamplighter extinguishing the street lamps; now all was quiet. I dropped my head on my arms for a moment.... Then, looking up at the marbled clouds behind which the stars seemed to drift, I muttered, to Whomsoever might be up there to hear: "Oh, let it all but sink and die away--let it all but sink and die away--and my life shall be--it shall be----" I do not know whether my lips framed the promise of what my life should be, could I but strike my bargain. PART II VERANDAH COTTAGE I In speaking of the early days of my married life I must throw myself largely on your consideration. I have not guarded through the years that sharp impatience that I presently came to feel with that tiny house in the Vale of Health. Lately I have thought more kindly of it, as if at some stage of my journey through Life (though I cannot tell when) I had heard a call behind me, turned my head, and, forgetting to turn it back again, had continued to advance backwards, recognising things in proportion as they receded. I live now in a mansion in Iddesleigh Gate; that ambition of mine, my spur in the past, is becoming a mere desire that when I go my successor shall find all in working order to his hand; and so the shabby brown earth I once trod has taken the lightsome blue of distance, and many things are seen through a sheen that, perhaps, never was there. Therefore if you would see that sheen it must be by your own favour and through whatever of glamour time and distance have given to your own young years.