An hour later she came down into the library again.  She had removed the traces of travel, and she had travelled slowly and was not tired.  All this enabled him to see how changed she was; and without looking older, how strangely oldened and grown how quiet of spirit.  She had now indeed become sister for him to those images of beauty that were always haunting him—­those far, dim images of the girlhood of her sex, with their faces turned away from the sun and their eyes looking downward, pensive in shadow, too freighted with thoughts of their brief fate and their immortality.

“I must have a long talk with you before I try to sleep.  I must empty my heart to you once.”

He knew that she needed the relief, and that what she asked of him during these hours would be silence.

“I have tried everything, and everything has failed.  I have tried absence, but absence has not separated me from him.  I have tried silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to him.  Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can.  It is more than will or purpose, it is my life.  It is more than life to me, it is love.”

She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress very far from the beginning.  After every start, she soon came back to that one beginning.

“It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it:  I tried that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes.  You must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or to myself.  Duty does not enter into my feeling:  it is love; all that I am forbids me to do anything else.”

But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the history of her heart.  “The morning after he told me, I went to church.  I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be on his side, and no one was on mine.  He had done wrong and was guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church comforted him and overlooked me; and I was angry and walked out of it.

“And do you remember the day I came to see you and you proposed everything to me, and I rejected everything?  You told me to go away for a while, to throw myself into the pleasures of other people; you reminded me of prayer and of the duty of forgiveness; you told me to try to put myself in his place, and reminded me of self-sacrifice, and then said at last that I must leave it to time, which sooner or later settles everything.  I rejected everything that you suggested.  But I have accepted everything since, and have learned a lesson and a service from each:  the meaning of prayer and of forgiveness and of self-sacrifice; and what the lapse of time can do to bring us to ourselves and show us what we wish.  I say, I have lived through all these, and I have gotten something out of them all; but however much they may mean, they never constitute love; and it is my love that brings me back to him now.”