pathy, and passages of sympathy in fight, and passages of
mutual succour, and passages of intercourse when incapacity to help has
in itself revealed the intensity of good-will in the watcher. But
whenever the heart has been fuller than its words, and the will has been
deeper than its actions, there is this beauty of regret. There has been
a wealth of love greater than could be given or received--not the love
of passion, but the love of the little children of the human race for
one another. This regret is too grave to belong to comedy, and too happy
to belong to tragedy. Rose's heart was full with this sorrow, if it be a
real sorrow. These are the sorrows of hearts that are too great for the
occasions of life, whereas the pain is far more common of the hearts
that are not big enough for what life gives them of opportunity.

Rose was oppressed by feelings she could not analyse, a sense of
possibilities of what might have been after these perfect weeks
together. But her feelings were dreamy; she had no sense of concrete
alternative; she did not now--he had been too skilful--expect Edmund to
ask her, nor did she wish him to ask her, to draw quite close to him.
She only felt at the end of this interlude they had spent together a
suspicion of the infinite reach of the soul, and the soul not rebelling
against its bonds, but conscious of them while awaiting freedom.

"Only I discern infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."

Such were the moments when a man might be pardoned if he called Rose's
beauty angelic--angelic of the type of Perugino's pictured angels, a
figure just treading on the earth enough to keep up appearances, but
whose very skirts float buoyantly in the fresh atmosphere of eternity.
They stood a few paces apart, Rose with her look bent vaguely towards
the shore, Edmund, still reading his letters, apparently unaware of her
presence. He was thus able to take a long exposure sun-picture of the
white figure on a sensitive memory that would prove but too retentive of
the impression.

But he had to speak at last. "Is it you?"

Edmund thought he spoke as usual, but there was a depth of pain and of
tenderness revealed in the face that usually betrayed so little. He held
out his hand unconsciously and then drew it back half closed, and looked
again at the flowing water. It was a moment of temptation, when love was
fighting against itself. Then, with the same half movement of the hand
tow