response, whatever it was, always came to the same thing - an
implied invitation to him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of

how much comfort she had in hers. For him indeed was no comfort
even in complaint, since every allusion to what had befallen them

but made the author of their trouble more present. Acton Hague was
between them - that was the essence of the matter, and never so

much between them as when they were face to face. Then Stransom,
while still wanting to banish him, had the strangest sense of

striving for an ease that would involve having accepted him.
Deeply disconcerted by what he knew, he was still worse tormented

by really not knowing. Perfectly aware that it would have been
horribly vulgar to abuse his old friend or to tell his companion

the story of their quarrel, it yet vexed him that her depth of
reserve should give him no opening and should have the effect of a

magnanimity greater even than his own.
He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were

in love with her that he should care so much what adventures she
had had. He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with

her; therefore nothing could have surprised him more than to
discover he was jealous. What but jealousy could give a man that

sore contentious wish for the detail of what would make him suffer?
Well enough he knew indeed that he should never have it from the

only person who to-day could give it to him. She let him press her
with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him with an exquisite mercy

and breathing equally little the word that would expose her secret
and the word that would appear to deny his literal right to

bitterness. She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted
everything but the possibility of her return to the old symbols.

Stransom divined that for her too they had been vividly individual,
had stood for particular hours or particular attributes -

particular links in her chain. He made it clear to himself, as he
believed, that his difficulty lay in the fact that the very nature

of the plea for his faithless friend constituted a prohibition;
that it happened to have come from HER was precisely the vice that

attached to it. To the voice of impersonalgenerosity he felt sure
he would have listened; he would have deferred to an advocate who,

speaking from abstract justice, knowing of his denial without
having known Hague, should have had the imagination to say: "Ah,

remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for him." To
provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of

his turpitudes was not to pity but to glorify him. The more
Stransom thought the more he made out that whatever this relation

of Hague's it could only have been a deception more or less finely
practised. Where had it come into the life that all men saw? Why

had one never heard of it if it had had the frankness of honourable
things? Stransom knew enough of his other ties, of his obligations

and appearances, not to say enough of his general character, to be
sure there had been some infamy. In one way or another this

creature had been coldly sacrificed. That was why at the last as
well as the first he must still leave him out and out.

CHAPTER IX.
AND yet this was no solution, especially after he had talked again

to his friend of all it had been his plan she should finally do for
him. He had talked in the other days, and she had responded with a

frankness qualified only by a courteousreluctance, a reluctance
that touched him, to linger on the question of his death. She had

then practically accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could
depend upon her to be the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it

was in the name of what had so passed between them that he appealed
to her not to forsake him in his age. She listened at present with

shining coldness and all her habitualforbearance to insist on her
terms; her deprecation was even still tenderer, for it expressed

the compassion of her own sense that he was abandoned. Her terms,
however, remained the same, and scarcely the less audible for not

being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more than he
she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have

provided her. They both missed the rich future, but she missed it
most, because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it

was her acceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of
her preference for the thought of Acton Hague over any other

thought whatever. He had humour enough to laugh rather grimly when
he said to himself: "Why the deuce does she like him so much more

than she likes me?" - the reasons being really so conceivable. But
even his faculty of analysis left the irritationstanding, and this

irritation proved perhaps the greatest misfortune that had ever
overtaken him. There had been nothing yet that made him so much

want to give up. He had of course by this time well reached the
age of renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to him that

it was time to give up everything.
Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced the

friendship once so charming and comforting. His privation had two
faces, and the face it had turned to him on the occasion of his

last attempt to cultivate that friendship was the one he could look
at least. This was the privation he inflicted; the other was the

privation he bore. The conditions she never phrased he used to
murmur to himself in solitude: "One more, one more - only just

one." Certainly he was going down; he often felt it when he caught
himself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice to that

inanity. There was proof enough besides in his being so weak and
so ill. His irritation took the form of melancholy, and his

melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite failed.
His altar moreover had ceased to exist; his chapel, in his dreams,

was a great dark cavern. All the lights had gone out - all his
Dead had died again. He couldn't exactly see at first how it had

been in the power of his late companion to extinguish them, since
it was neither for her nor by her that they had been called into

being. Then he understood that it was essentially in his own soul
the revival had taken place, and that in the air of this soul they

were now unable to breathe. The candles might mechanically burn,
but each of them had lost its lustre. The church had become a

void; it was his presence, her presence, their common presence,
that had made the indispensablemedium. If anything was wrong

everything was - her silence spoiled the tune.
Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that he went

back; reflecting that as they had been his best society for years
his Dead perhaps wouldn't let him forsake them without doing

something more for him. They stood there, as he had left them, in
their tall radiance, the bright cluster that had already made him,

on occasions when he was willing to compare small things with
great, liken them to a group of sea-lights on the edge of the ocean

of life. It was a relief to him, after a while, as he sat there,
to feel they had still a virtue. He was more and more easily

tired, and he always drove now; the action of his heart was weak
and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the action of his

fancy. None the less he returned yet again, returned several
times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a

renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience. In winter the
church was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the

glow of his shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask.
He sat and wondered to what he had reduced his absentassociate and

what she now did with the hours of her absence. There were other
churches, there were other altars, there were other candles; in one

way or another her piety would still operate; he couldn't
absolutely have deprived her of her rites. So he argued, but

without contentment; for he well enough knew there was no other
such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had once mentioned

to him as the satisfaction of her need. As this semblance again
gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he

found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her
darkness; for never so much as in these weeks had his rites been

real, never had his gathered company seemed so to respond and even
to invite. He lost himself in the large lustre, which was more and

more what he had from the first wished it to be - as dazzling as
the vision of heaven in the mind of a child. He wandered in the

fields of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from tier to
tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the white

intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another. It
was in the quiet sense of having saved his souls that his deep

strange instinct rejoiced. This was no dim theologicalrescue, no
boon of a contingent world; they were saved better than faith or

works could save them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk
from dying to, for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of

human remembrance.
By this time he had survived all his friends; the last straight

flame was three years old, there was no one to add to the list.