long; his heart had
hungered for her so long, in silence even to himself. She had been dead
and now she was about to be raised from the dead. He lighted the
candles, locked the doors, and paced softly up and down, stopping to
look at the figure on the bed from time to time. Far around him, close
about him, life was moving at its usual jog-trot pace. People were going
back to their College rooms or domestic hearths, grumbling about the
weather or their digestions or their colds, thinking of their work for
the evening or of their dinner engagements--and suddenly a door had shut
between him and all that outside world. He was no longer moving in the
driven herd. He was alone, above them in an upper chamber, awaiting the
miracle of resurrection.

In the visions that passed before his mind's eye the face of Milly,
pale, with pleading eyes, was not absent; but with a strange hardness
which he had never felt before, he thrust the sighing phantom from him.
She had had her turn of happiness, a long one; it was only fair that
now they two, he and that Other, should have their chance, should put
their lips to the full cup of life. The figure on the bed stirred,
turned on one side, and slipped a hand under the pure curve of the young
cheek. He was by the bed in a moment; but it still slept, though less
profoundly, without that tranced look, as though the flame of life
itself burned low within.

How would she first greet him? Last time she had leaned into the clear
sunshine and laughed to him from the cloud of her amber hair; and a
spirit in his blood had leaped to the music of her laugh, even while the
rational self knew not it was the lady of his love. But however she came
back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after
all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been
set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing
to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day,
it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky
discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of
his daily work. And this, too, was good.

Yes, it was better because of the contrast between the wonder and its
environment, better because he himself was more conscious of his joy. He
sat on the bed a while watching her impatiently. In his eyes she was
already filled with a new loveliness, but he wanted her hair, her amber
hair. It was bru