'You say in your note that you have something important to tell me ?' She made a sign of assent, and as he grasped her hand, she allowed herself a moment's pause.

Her eyes rested--just perceptibly--on the face of the man whose long devotion to her, expressed through every phase of delicate and passionate service, had brought them both at last to that point where feeling knows itself--where illusions die away--and the deep foundations of our life appear.
Welby's dark face quivered.

In the touch of his friend's hand, in the look of her eyes there was that which told him that she had bidden him to no common meeting.

The air between them was in an instant alive with memories.

Days of first youth; youth's high impressions of great and lovely things; all the innocent, stingless joys of art and travel, of happy talk and ripening faculty, of pure ambitions, hero-worships, compassions, shared and mutually enkindled: these were for ever intertwined with their thoughts of each other.
But much more than these! For him, the unspoken agony of loss suffered when she married; for her, the memories of her marriage, of the dreary languor into which its wreck had plunged her, and of the gradual revival in her of the old intellectual pleasures, the old joys of the spirit, under the influence of Arthur's life and Arthur's companionship.