eep. Here on the felled trunk, which still lay rotting in its old
place, they would now sit, gazing at the descending sheet of water, with
its never-ending sarcastic hiss at their baffled attempts to make
themselves one flesh. Returning to the house they would sit down
together to tea, after which, and the confidential chat that accompanied
it, he walked home by the declining light. This proceeding became as
periodic as an astronomical recurrence. Twice a week he came--all
through that winter, all through the spring following, through the
summer, through the autumn, the next winter, the next year, and the next,
till an appreciable span of human life had passed by. Bellston still
tarried.

Years and years Nic walked that way, at this interval of three days, from
his house in the neighbouring town; and in every instance the aforesaid
order of things was customary; and still on his arrival the form of words
went on--'He has not come?'

'He has not.'

So they grew older. The dim shape of that third one stood continually
between them; they could not displace it; neither, on the other hand,
could it effectually part them. They were in close communion, yet not
indissolubly united; lovers, yet never growing cured of love. By the
time that the fifth year of Nic's visiting had arrived, on about the five-
hundredth occasion of his presence at her tea-table, he noticed that the
bleaching process which had begun upon his own locks was also spreading
to hers. He told her so, and they laughed. Yet she was in good health:
a condition of suspense, which would have half-killed a man, had been
endured by her without complaint, and even with composure.

One day, when these years of abeyance had numbered seven, they had
strolled as usual as far as the waterfall, whose faint roar formed a sort
of calling voice sufficient in the circumstances to direct their
listlessness. Pausing there, he looked up at her face and said, 'Why
should we not try again, Christine? We are legally at liberty to do so
now. Nothing venture nothing have.'

But she would not. Perhaps a little primness of idea was by this time
ousting the native daring of Christine. 'What he has done once he can do
twice,' she said. 'He is not dead, and if we were to marry he would say
we had "forced his hand," as he said before, and duly reappear.'

Some years after, when Christine was about fifty, and Nicholas
fifty-three, a new trouble of a minor kind arrived.