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Perhaps the knot of the whole difficulty lay there. Desperately as she might yearn, he felt that she could not conceive happiness. Perhaps nothing but the death of one of those parents would bring her awake—alone—drive her to living.

'Your heart was too tender for such storms. It makes me wild to think of it—to think of your sitting there, hearing——' The vividness of the picture he saw caused him to wince away from its unbelievable pathos, its meagre sharpness, like the outlines of a remote folk-story, suddenly quickened to life by the lips of one of its participants.

'I think I could repeat every word,' she said quietly. 'They—each thought the other unfaithful. They proved that each was certain, no matter how much the other denied it, and that they would be obliged by every human consideration to hate each other to the end of life. And they have never spoken to each other since.'

'Never?' He mused with what seemed an idle particularity. His mind had accepted the fact long since, so that it did not occur to him to brand this inveterate silence as insane and foreign to humanity. Everyone in his boyhood world had accepted it.