Later he found himself in the woods near the great oak that lay just as it had fallen that night. Beneath all the confused tumult of his thoughts one clear truth rang like a bell, one bitter-sweet certainty that caught him smiling strangely as he realised it! "She's won! She's won!" There, while the branches swayed above him, and the surf, sinister and monotonous, pounded below, the vision that had made them both famous melted into the elusive reality, and he lived again with absolute abandonment that sweet mad night, he felt again her hair blown about his face as he lay on the windy cliff with the lady of his dreams. For him her fate was not dreadful--she could not have died like other women. There was an intoxication in her sudden taking away: she was rapt out of life as she would have wished, he knew. Slowly there grew upon him a frightened wonder if she had lived for this. Her actual life had been so empty, so unreal, so concentrated in those piercing stolen moments; she had ended it, once the heart of it had been caught and fixed to give to others faint thrills of all she had felt so utterly. "She died for it!" he felt, with a kind of awe that was far from all personal vanity--the blameless egoism of the artist. He left the little town hardly consciously. On his outward voyage, when the gale beat the vessel and the wind howled to the thundering waves, he came to know that though a love more real, a passion less elusive, might one day hold him, there would rest always in his heart and brain one ceaseless inspiration, one strange, sweet memory that nothing could efface. WHEN PIPPA PASSED Mr. Delafield, stepping comfortably forth from his club, had dined especially well, and was in a correspondingly good humour. As the brisk March wind swept across the corner just in front of him, he meanwhile settling his glossy hat more firmly on a fine, close-clipped grey head, a sudden kindly impulse, not entirely usual with him, sent him bending to his knee to pick up the fugitive slip of white, scribbled foolscap that fluttered by him, hotly pursued by a slender young man. "Thanks. Oh, thanks!" murmured the pursuer, as Delafield, with a courteous inclination of the head, tendered the captured slip. "Not at all." A consciousness of the boy's quick panting, his anxious tug at the paper, actually an almost audible beating of the heart, drew the older man to look carefully at him. A white, oval face, drooping mouth, black, deep-set eyes that fairly burned into his, compelled attention. "Important paper, I suppose?" he inquired lightly. "Wouldn't want to lose it." "No--oh, no!" "Get a wigging at the office?" "It--it's not--they are my own--it is a poem!" stammered the young man. Delafield chuckled involuntarily, and then, as a quick red poured over the other's cheeks, he made a hasty gesture of apology.