little chills into the
places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and
watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part
of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the
power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept
close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that
held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.

With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the
highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that
they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor--did Amory dream
her? Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their
souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew
him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of
her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads
this she will say:

"And Amory will have no other adventure like me."

Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh.

Eleanor tried to put it on paper once:

"The fading things we only know
We'll have forgotten...
Put away...
Desires that melted with the snow,
And dreams begotten
This to-day:
The sudden dawns we laughed to greet,
That all could see, that none could share,
Will be but dawns... and if we meet
We shall not care.

Dear... not one tear will rise for this...
A little while hence
No regret
Will stir for a remembered kiss--
Not even silence,
When we've met,
Will give old ghosts a waste to roam,
Or stir the surface of the sea...
If gray shapes drift beneath the foam
We shall not see."

They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that _sea_ and
_see_ couldn't possibly be used as a rhyme. And then Eleanor had part of
another verse that she couldn't find a beginning for:

"... But wisdom passes... still the years
Will feed us wisdom.... Age will go
Back to the old--
For all our tears
We shall not know."

Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest of the
old families of Ramilly County and lived in a big, gloomy house with her
grandfather. She had been born and brought up in France.... I see I am
starting wrong. Let me begin again.

Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go for
far walks b