The Well-Beloved

parable from her personality. The dining room was real no more, dissolving under the bold stony promontory and the incoming West Sea. The handsome marchioness in geranium-red and diamonds, who

e had been a few years older, would have been as old-fashioned as her daughter, shaped themselves to the dusty quarries of his and Avice's parents, down which he had clambered with Avice hundreds of times. The ivy trailing about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks

me a woman of his acquaintance with no distinctive traits; she seemed to grow material, a superficies

one of the most distinguished of portrait painters; but there was only one painter for Jocelyn-his own memory. All that was eminent in European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless and

nown not only what every one of them was saying and doing throughout the repast, but what every one was thinking. So, being an old frien

him than a statement of its facts. He told of the opening of th

ed, I may almost say!' he added; 'and the

ed it as such. She was the single lady of his circle whom nothing erratic in his doings c

lked abstractedly along the streets till he found himself at his own door. In his

dds and ends, which Pierston had thrown into it from time to time in past years for future sorting-an intention that he had never carried out. From the melancholy mass of papers, faded photo

afternoon they had spent together at a neighbouring watering-place, when he had suggested her sitting to a touting artist on the sands, there being nothing else for them to do. A long contemplation of the likeness completed in his emotions what the letter had begun. He loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life

ishly given him before her consciousness of womanhood had been a

She had been another man's wife almost the whole time since he was estranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did not make his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost

s of an afternoon, and were not ashamed to confess among themselves to personal weaknesses and follies, knowing well that such secrets would go no f

e, under the young pale moon. The symbol signified well. The divinity of the silver bow was not more excellently pure than she, the lost, had been. Under that moon was the island of Ancient Slingers, and on the island a house, framed from mullions to chimney-top like the isle itself, of

urish in him. Like his own, her family had been islanders for centuries-from Norman, Anglian, Roman, Balearic-British times. Hence in her nature, as in his, was some mysterious ingredient sucked from the isle; otherwise a racial instinct necessary to t

recalled those of the Italian peasantry to any one as familiar as he was with them; and there were evidences that the Roman colonists had been populous and long-abiding in and near this corner of Britain. Tradition urged that a temple to Venus

when they had talked a little while Somers alluded casu

e there,' sa

ou pro

As he spoke his eyes turned, and remained fixed on a table near. So

she?' h

es

bygone aff

lighted, Alfred,' he said. 'Because she's the only one I ough

an go to her grave at any time as we

ow that she

Academy night! Of a

re about th

lic away from the popular paintings into the usually deserted Lecture-room, and people who have seen your last pieces of stuff say there has been nothing like them since sixteen hundred and-since the sculptors 'of the g

ers,' replied his friend, with abstracte

accessible. At two o'clock in the afternoon he was rattled along by this new means of locomotion, under the familiar monotonous line of bran-coloured stones, and he soon emerged from the station

ce was to have accompanied him on the night of his departure. Had she appeared the primitive betrothal, with its natural result,

ipping just as they had formerly done, and within sound of

ace of the isle, a ruffled patch in mid-distance as u

ottom of the mo

light, was defined, in addition to the distant lighthouse, a church with its tower, standing about a quarter of a mile off, near

a long box, and two or three persons in black followed. The coffin, with its twelve legs, crawled across the isle, while around and beneath it the flashing

behind them, the surplice of the priest still blowing. Jocelyn stood with his hat off: he was present, though he was

g interred; HIS Avice, as he now began presumptuously to call her. Presen

ts that he had formerly visited with her. But, as if tethered to the churchyard by a cord, he was still conscious of being at the end o

s window in London he could see the yet fresh foot-marks of the mourners and bearers. The breeze had fallen to a calm with the setting of the sun: the lighthouse had opened its glaring eye, and,