you
came to think of it, that a man who would contribute to the sum of his
wife's future perhaps, the price of a silver tea salver, should so hold
him to account for it. Nevertheless the talk left a faint savour of
dryness. It was part of his new pride in himself as a possession of hers
that he should in all things come up to the measure of men, but the one
thing which should justify his being so ticketed and set aside by them
as the Provider, the Footer-up of Accounts, was the assurance which only
she could give, of his being the one thing, good or bad, which could be
made to answer for her happiness.

Walking home by the river to avoid as far as possible the baked,
oven-smelling streets, he was aware how strangely the whole earth ached
for her. He was here walking, as he had been since his first seeing her,
at the core of a great light and harmony, and walking alone in it. If
just loving her had been sufficient occupation for his brief courtship,
for the present it failed him. For he was not only alone but lonely. He
saw her swept aside by the calculating crowd--strange that Ellen and
Clarice should be a part of it--not only out of reach of his live
passion, but beyond all speech. Alone in his room he felt suddenly faint
for the want of her. He turned off the light with which he had first
flooded it, for the flare of the street came feebly in through the
summer leafage, and sat sensing the need of her as a thing to be handled
and measured, a benumbing, suffocating presence. As he sat, a sound of
music floated by, and a thin pencil of light from a pleasure barge on
the river flitted from window to window, travelling the gilt line of a
picture-frame and the dark block of a picture that hung over his bed.
And as it touched in passing the high ramping figure of a knight in
armour, the old magic worked. He felt himself flung as it were across
great distances, and dizzy with the turn, to her side. He was there to
maintain in the face of all worldly reckoning, the excluding, spiritual
quality of their relation. The more his engagement to Eunice Goodward
failed of being the usual, the expected thing, the more authority it
derived for its supernal sources. It took the colour of true romance
from its unlikelihood. Peter turned on the light, and drawing paper to
him, began to write.

"Lovely Lady," the letter began, and as if the words had been an
incantation, the room was full and palpitating with his stored-up
dreams. They c