"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore, and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publishing a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul alive." § 3 I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room. Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken. And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a character in the story. I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. "It's a letter from Mary Justin," I said. She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what she had to do with that and then remarked, "I thought you two were not to correspond." "Yes," I said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding." There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet. "I suppose," said Rachel, "she wants to hear from you again." "She thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great friends." "Of course," said Rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. You must have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write." "I suppose," she added, "her husband knows." "She's told him, she says...."