Yes, Ella was right. It was good to be alive, to feel heart and brain and body on the alert, responsive to outer things. But whence had come the change? It was years since he had felt so young and conscious of power. Was it the touch of a girl's fresh cheek against his lips? He did not know. The feelings that had prompted the act were too new, too undefined, for immediate analysis. The spell of the benumbing heartache that had held him nerveless for four long years seemed to be broken, and he was a man again. He looked upward at the stars in the simple fancy that the dear dead wife, the Constance he had worshipped so passionately, was gazing down upon him with happy consent in her pure eyes. The love he had given her was immortal, and she knew it. It was no disloyalty to love another sweet woman on earth and to put his own broken life and his motherless child into her keeping.... Yet after a few moments he lowered his gaze for a while and walked on, his heart filled with the old love. He was one of those reserved natures, capable of intense feeling, yet incapable of outward expression, who make for themselves few friends and are often condemned to loneliness of soul. Born with greater cravings for sympathy than most men, they have less power to demand it. This is too busy a world for us to stop to wonder whether a man wants what he does not ask for; too many are clamouring loudly for what we cannot give. So the unfortunates are passed by unheeded, each working out in his heart his little tragedy of unfulfilled longings. But when a finer spirit comes and divines their needs, then their hearts leap towards it and cling to it with a great unexpressed passion of gratitude. Such had been the beginning of Sylvesters love for his wife; such that of his dawning love for Ella. Each in her way had comprehended his solitude; unasked in words, but spiritually besought, each had filled it with her influence. He needed the peculiar sympathy that a woman alone can give, her companionship, her practical intellect, to complement his theoretic mind. His nature cried dumbly for a whole-hearted, expansive creature to give objectivity to life. Left to himself, he sank into routine; he lacked the power of bringing colour and harmony into his world. This the woman he loved could do. Once, for a few short years, a woman had changed his universe. Then she had died, and the blackness of night had encompassed him. He had suffered silently, as a strong man suffers, rarely mentioning her name, but eating out his heart in desolation; and then Ella had come. He had known her from early childhood, but had last seen her as the schoolgirl of no account.