ER XXV

"IT HAS GONE VERY DEEP"

When you depart from me, sorrow abides and happiness
takes his leave.
--SHAKESPEARE.

Fulfil the perfection of long-suffering--be thou
patient.
--Teaching of Buddha.

All his life long Malcolm never spoke of the hours that followed that
fateful interview down by the Pool, when he was as one who had just
received his baptism of fire--when he was scorched through and through
with that new and terrible agony.

"He will take it hardly," Dinah had said to herself. "His nature is
intense, and he will suffer more than most men;" and she was right.
Malcolm did suffer cruelly.

He had spoken his parting words to Elizabeth with outward calmness,
though his lips were blanched and his features drawn with pain; for he
was a gentleman, and noblesse oblige, and why should he make her suffer
when she had done him no wrong? "I am not the only man who has been
denied his heart's desire," he had said to her in a dull, lifeless
voice, and in this he was certainly right. All are not winners in the
race; many fail to attain their goal, and retire baffled and
disheartened from the contest; but few suffer as Malcolm Herrick did,
and though he did not curse the day he was born, as Job did, the whole
plan and purpose of his life seemed frustrated and the future a
hopeless blank.

And the fault was his own! Even in his most despairing moments he never
ceased to tell himself that she had never encouraged him--never held
out her woman's sceptre for him to touch; and even when she had been
most sweet and winsome, she had not abridged the distance between them,
nor, in her noble sincerity and friendship, attempted to draw him
closer.

No, it was he who had been a blind fool, and he must pay the penalty of
his madness. The gates of his earthly paradise had closed behind him
for ever. He could hear them clanging in the distance; and the golden
bells of his city of dreams were chiming "Nevermore--oh, nevermore!"

"His City of dreams--what a good name!" thought he; and through the
long summer days he had dwelt there like a king. And now the gates had
closed, and the golden pinnacles were no longer visible, and the breath
of the roses and the fragrance of the spices of Araby the blessed would
no longer steep his senses in sweetness. Nevermore--oh, nevermore would
those blissful dreams be his!

Malcolm never quite recollected what he did with