a sea that has gone to sleep.

Golden lilies swung their censers softly, and the exquisite incense
perfumed the dusk. Fairy lamp-bearers starred the night with glimmering
radiance, faintly seen afar. A cricket chirped just outside the window
and a ghostly white moth circled around the evening lamp.

Roger sat by the table, with Keats's letters to his beloved Fanny open
before him. The letter to Constance, so strangely brought back after all
the intervening years, lay beside the book. The ink was faded and the
paper was yellow, but his father's love, for a woman not his mother,
stared the son full in the face and was not to be denied.

Was this all, or--? His thought refused to go further. Constance North
had died, by her own hand, four days after the letter was written. What
might not have happened in four days? In one day, Columbus found a
world. In another, electricity was discovered. In one day, one hour,
even, some immeasurable force moving according to unseen law might sway
the sun and set all the stars to reeling madly through the unutterable
midnights of the universe. And in four days? Ah, what had happened in
those four days?

[Sidenote: A Recurring Question]

The question had haunted him since the night he read the letter, when he
was reading to Barbara and had unwittingly come upon it. Constance was
dead and Laurence Austin was dead, but their love lived on. The grave
was closed against it, and in neither heaven nor hell could it find an
abiding-place. Ghostly and forbidding, it had sent Constance to haunt
Miriam's troubled sleep, it had filled Ambrose North's soul with cruel
doubt and foreboding, and had now come back to Roger and Barbara, to ask
eternal questions of the one, and stir the heart of the other to new
depths of pain.

He had not seen Barbara since that night and she had sent no message. No
beacon light in the window across the way said "come." The sword that
had lain, keen-edged and cruel, between Constance and her lover, had, by
a single swift stroke, changed everything between her daughter and his
son.

Not that Barbara herself was less beautiful or less dear. Roger had
missed her more than he realised. When her lovely, changing face had
come between his eyes and the musty pages of his law books, while the
disturbing Bascom pup cavorted merrily around the office, unheard and
unheeded, Roger had ascribed it to the letter that had forced them
apart.

* * * *