have had a meaning....  We understand so little of life.  No, no, it had no meaning in his mind, and we are only concerned with our own minds.  All the same, the fact remained—­she had had to seek rest in a convent; and the idea that had driven her there, though now lying at the bottom of her mind, might be brought to the surface—­any chance word; he had had proof.  Perhaps it was as well that he had not laid his hand upon her shoulder and asked her to stay with him, for by what spectacle of remorse, of terror, might he not have been confronted to-morrow or the next day?  Cured!  Nobody is ever cured.  Never again would she be the same woman as had left Dulwich to go to Paris with him, he knew that well enough; and he, too, was very far indeed from being the same Owen Asher who had gone to Dulwich to hear a concert of Elizabethan music.

A period for every one, for every one a season.  The gates of love open, and we pass into the garden and out of it by another gate, which never opens for us again.  To linger by a closed or a closing gate is not wise:  the tarrying lover is a subject for contempt and jeers; better to pass out quickly and to fare on, though it requires courage to fare on through the autumn, knowing that after autumn comes winter.  True, the winds would grow harder.  The autumn of their lives was not over, the skies were still bright above them, and the winds soft and low.  The winds would grow harder, but they must still fare on through the snow.  But there is a joy by the hearth when the yule-log is burning.  So thanking God that he had not attempted to detain her, he wandered to the window to watch the stars, which seemed to him like a golden net; and he asked who had cast that net, and if he and she were parcel of some great draught which, at some indefinite date, would be drawn out of the depths, and if, when that time came, they would remember the joy and sorrow they had endured upon earth, or if all would be swept into forgetfulness.  At some indefinite date they might meet among the stars, but what stellar infinities might be drawn together mattered little to him; his sole interest was in this lag end of their journey—­if their lives should be united henceforth or lived separately.

Nothing repeats itself, so it was well he had not asked her to stay with him.  Of mistress and lover a fitting end had been written long ago, just as the end of those stars was written long before the stars came into being; but it might well be that they might take the road, this lag end of it, together as husband and wife.  If he didn’t marry —­he could marry nobody but her—­what would he do with his life? what sort of end?  He had no heart for further travels, and feared to wear away the years amid books and pictures, collecting rare porcelain and French furniture; there is very little else for an old man.  With her the lag end of the journey would be delectable.  In the same house together, leading her in the evenings to the piano!  Even if she had lost part of her voice, sufficient remained to recall the old days when he used to journey thousands of miles to hear her; and he lay quite still, listening to the sweet thought of marriage, singing like a bird in the acacia-tree, trill after trill, and then a run—­ delicious crescendos reaching to the stars, diminuendos sinking into the valley.