"Ah, but you were far more than this, my dear girl. You were his ideal of womanhood. He believed in your strength and tenderness, your graciousness and truth. You shattered this ideal; you failed this faith in you. His fanciful, artistic, eclectic nature with all its unused possibilities of faithful and passionate devotion, had found its haven in your love; and in twelve hours you turned it adrift. Jane--it was a crime. The magnificent strength of the fellow is shown by the way he took it. His progress in his art was not arrested. All his best work has been done since. He has made no bad mad marriage, in mockery of his own pain; and no grand loveless one, to spite you. He might have done both--I mean either. And when I realise that the poor fellow I was with yesterday--making such a brave fight in the dark, and turning his head on the pillow to say with a gleam of hope on his drawn face: `Where Thou art Guide, no ill can come'--had already been put through all this by you--Jane, if you were a man, I'd horsewhip you!" said the doctor. Jane squared her shoulders and lifted her head with more of her old spirit than she had yet shown. "You have lashed me well, Boy," she said, "as only words spoken in faithful indignation can lash. And I feel the better for the pain.-- And now I think I ought to tell you that while I was on the top of the Great Pyramid I suddenly saw the matter from a different standpoint. You remember that view, with its sharp line of demarcation? On one side the river, and verdure, vegetation, fruitfulness, a veritable 'garden enclosed'; on the other, vast space as far as the eye could reach; golden liberty, away to the horizon, but no sign of vegetation, no hope of cultivation, just barren, arid, loneliness. I felt this was an exact picture of my life as I live it now. Garth's love, flowing through it, as the river, could have made it a veritable 'garden of the Lord.' It would have meant less liberty, but it would also have meant no loneliness. And, after all, the liberty to live for self alone becomes in time a weary bondage. Then I realised that I had condemned him also to this hard desert life. I came down and took counsel of the old Sphinx. Those calm, wise eyes, looking on into futurity, seemed to say: 'They only live who love.' That evening I resolved to give up the Nile trip, return home immediately, send for Garth, admit all to him, asking him to let us both begin again just where we were three years ago in the moonlight on the terrace at Shenstone. Ten minutes after I had formed this decision, I heard of his accident." The doctor shaded his face with his hand. "The wheels of time," he said in a low voice, "move forward--always; backward, never." "Oh, Deryck," cried Jane, "sometimes they do. You and Flower know that sometimes they do."