y he gave little attention to his affairs. His melancholy, held
at bay by the extraordinary experience through which he had passed,
returned and claimed him. He shut himself up in his library until the
following morning, and alternated the hours with fruitless attempts to
write and equally fruitless attempts to solve the problem in regard
to Weir. The next day and night, with the exception of a few hours'
restless sleep, were spent in the same way.

At the end of the third day not a word had flowed from his pen, not
a step nearer had he drawn to Weir. A dull despair took possession
of him. Had those song-children fled, discouraged, and was he to be
withheld from the one consolation of earthly happiness? He pushed back
the chair in which he had been sitting before his desk and went into
the library. He opened one of the windows and looked out. How quiet it
was! He could hear the rising wind sighing through the yews, but all
nature was elsewise asleep. What was she doing down at Rhyd-Alwyn?
Sleeping calmly, or blindly striving to link the past with the
present? He had heard from her but once since he left. Perhaps she too
had had a revelation. He wondered if it were as quiet there as here,
or if the waves at the foot of the castle still thundered unceasingly
on. He wondered if she would shrink from him when the truth came to
her. Doubtless, for she had been reared in the most rigid of moral
conventions, and naturally catholic-minded as she was, right, to her,
was right, and wrong was wrong. He closed the window and, throwing
himself on a sofa, fell asleep. But his dreams were worse than his
waking thoughts. He was wandering in eternal darkness looking for
someone lost ages ago, and a voice beside him was murmuring that he
would never find her, but must go on--on--forever; that the curse
of some crime committed centuries ago was upon him, and that he must
expiate it in countless existences and eternal torment. And far off,
on the very confines of space, floated a wraith-like thing with
the lithe grace of a woman whom he had loved on earth. And she was
searching for him, but they described always the same circle and never
met. And then, finally, after millions of years, an invisible hand
clutched him and bore him upward onto a plane, hitherto unexplored,
then left him to grope his way as he could. All was blackness and
chaos. Around him, as he passed them, he saw that dark suns were
burning, but there was nothing to conduct