grasp an abiding answer, that he had evoked a deeper enigma. For the beauty, born of nature and spirit, itself was dumb. Beauty arose before him; but her finger was on her lips. He was no Orpheus; he lamented no lost Eurydice. He felt, he sought; but he had never seen her.
But where was his thought now leading him? Graham felt himself turn back. And, as so often in his life, it was to Jill he turned. Dear Jill. Bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; innocent earth; earth without its enigma. He never sought, since he had never needed, Jill. She was there too completely; his child, his playmate, his companion. With Jill he was at one with nature; with all that had been happy in his childhood. That was his good fortune;—but it had nothing to do with the self beneath appearance. It was an Eurydice that self needed; the habitant of another, and a deeper world; she who knew the secrets of the grave and the secrets—must it not be so?—of Elysium; of the eternal beauty that drew life on towards a perpetual contemplation.
'But what am I thinking of now?' said Graham to himself as he saw suddenly that the sycamores of the Manoir were below him. 'In Heaven's name let me rid myself of this folly. It's as if I were bewitched,' he thought. 'And I'm not going, at this time of my life, to confuse the ewig-weibliche with the Platonic forms!' Such, indeed, had never been his tendency. The loves of his youth had been ironically transient. And now, in passing through the Manoir gate, he could shake off
