“No--it wouldn’t do,” he ruminated, vexedly. “She”--here he alluded to his fat wife--“she would make the devil’s own row, and I have enough of her sulks as it is. I’d better do nothing,--and just wait my chance. But--that exquisite Diana! _What_ is she? I _must_ know! I must be off with the ‘old’ love, before I’m on with the new! But _is_ she the ‘old’? That’s the puzzle. Is she the ‘old,’ or a young Diana?” This was a question which was destined never to be answered, so far as he was concerned. Diana had gone from him,--gone in that swift, irrecoverable way which happens when one soul, advancing onward to higher planes of power, is compelled to leave another of grosser make (even though that other were lover or friend) to wallow in the styes of sensual and material life. She, clothed in her vesture of fire and light, as radiant as any spirit of legendary lore, was as far removed from the clay man of low desires as the highest star from the deepest earth. And though he did not know this, and never would have been able, had he known, to realise the forceful vitality of her existence, the same strange sense of physical weakness, tiredness and general incapacity which had before alarmed him came upon him now with such overwhelming weight that he could hardly drag his limbs across the fashionable square in which his own house was situated. A great helplessness possessed him,--and a thought, bitter as wormwood and sharp as flame, flashed through his brain: “I am getting old!” It was a thought he always put away from him--but just now it bore down upon him with a kind of thunderous gloom. Yes--he was “getting old,”--he, who had more or less contemptuously considered the “age” of the woman he had callously thrown over sufficient cause for the rupture,--he, too, was likely to be left out in the cold by the hurrying tide of warmer, quicker, youthful life. The vision of the radiant eyes, the exquisite features, the rose-leaf skin, and the supple, graceful form of the marvellous Diana who so persistently declared herself to be his former betrothed, floated before him in tempting, tantalising beauty,--and as he opened his own house-door with his latch-key to enter that abode of domestic bliss where his unwieldy wife talked commonplaces all day long and bored him to death, he uttered something like a groan. “Whatever her fancy or craze may be,” he said, “she is young! Young and perfectly beautiful! It is I who am old!” EPILOGUE