young
man,' all-knowing and all-foolish, and he came very near losing his soul
in the nightmare. But he had too much ballast in him to go quite under,
and at last strength came, and he shook the weakness from him. Yet the
fall had been too far and too cruel for him to be happy again soon. He
had gone forth so confident in his new strength of manly love; and to
fall so, and almost without an effort! Who has not called upon the
mountains to cover him in such an hour of awakening, and who will
wonder that Narcissus dared not look upon the face of Hesper till
solitude had washed him clean, and bathed him in its healing oil? I
alone bade him good-bye. It was in this room wherein I am writing, the
study we had taken together, where still his books look down at me from
the shelves, and all the memorials of his young life remain. O _can_ it
have been but 'a phantom of false morning'? A Milton snatched up at the
last moment was the one book he took with him.

From that night until this he has made but one sign--a little note which
Hesper has shown me, a sob and a cry to which even a love that had been
more deeply wronged could never have turned a deaf ear. Surely not
Hesper, for she has long forgiven him, knowing his weakness for what it
was. She and I sometimes sit here together in the evenings and talk of
him; and every echo in the corridor sets us listening, for he may be at
the other side of the world, or but the other side of the street--we
know so little of his fate. Where he is we know not; but if he still
lives, _what_ he is we have the assurance of faith. This time he has not
failed, we know. But why delay so long?

_November_ 1889--_May_ 1890. _November_ 1894.

THE END

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by Le Gallienne, Richard

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