But she did not think so now, and in an ecstasy of joy she stood in the deep recess of the bay-window watching him as he went away through the moonlight and the feathery cloud of snow, wondering why, when she was so happy, there should cling to her a haunting presentiment that she and Arthur would never meet again just as they had parted. Arthur, on the contrary, was troubled with no such presentiment. Of Anna he hardly thought, or, if he did, the vision was obscured by the fair picture he had seen standing in the door with the snow-flakes resting on its hair like pearls in a golden cabinet. And Arthur thanked his God that he was beginning at last to feel right, that the solemn vows he was so soon to utter would not be a mockery. It was Arthur’s wish to teach to others how dark and mysterious are the ways of Providence, but he had not himself half learned that lesson in all its strange reality; but the lesson was coming on apace; each stride of his swift-footed beast brought him nearer and nearer to the great shock waiting for him upon his study-table, where his man had put it. He saw it the first thing on entering the room, but he did not take it up until the snow was brushed from his garments and he had seated himself by the cheerful fire blazing on the hearth. Then sitting in his easy-chair and moving the lamp nearer to him, he took Mrs. Meredith’s letter and broke the seal, starting as if a serpent had stung him when in the note enclosed he recognized his own handwriting, the same he had sent to Anna when his heart was as full of hope as the brown stalks, now beating against his windows with a dismal sound, were full of fragrant blossoms. Both had died since then, the roses and his hopes, and Arthur almost wished that he, too, were dead when he read Mrs. Meredith’s letter and saw the gulf he was treading. Like the waves of the sea his love for Anna came rolling back upon him, augmented and intensified by all that he had suffered, and by the terrible conviction that it could not be, although, alas, “it might have been.” He repeated these words over and over again, as, stupefied with pain, he sat gazing at vacancy, thinking how true was the couplet: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these,—_it might_ have been.”