“I have had all the joy that the world could bestow;
   I have lived—­I have loved.”

So sings the poet, and truly.  Though to this woman love had brought not joy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay and stronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appeared little better than a delusion, a dream.  Once, and by one only, her whole nature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right entirely satisfied.  And nothing had ever shattered this ideal.  She clung to it, as we cling to the memory of our dead children, who are children forever.

With a passionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy’s goodness, his rare and noble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she might have judged severely, had it happened to another person—­his total, unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself.  It was utterly irreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless to unravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery in heaven and earth, with the humble cry, “I can not understand—­I love.”

She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desert of despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost a conviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow.  This day, even, when, after an hour’s delicious idleness, she roused herself to take her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle while they played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividly back that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiar step, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtake her on the St. Andrews shore—­Robert Roy, a young man, with his life all before him, as was hers.  Now she was middle-aged, and he—­he must be over forty by this time.  How strange!

Stranger still that there had never occurred to her one possibility—­that he “was not,” that God had taken him.  But this her heart absolutely refused to accept.  So long as he was in it, the world would never be quite empty to her.  Afterward—­But, as I said, there are some things which can not be faced and this was one of them.

All else she had faced long ago.  She did not grieve now.  As she walked with her children, listening to their endless talk with that patient sympathy which made all children love her, and which she often found was a better help to their education than dozens of lessons, there was on her face that peaceful expression which is the greatest preservative of youth, the greatest antidote to change.  And so it was no wonder that a tall lad, passing and re-passing on the Esplanade with another youth, looked at her more than once with great curiosity, and advanced with hesitating politeness.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am, if I mistake; but you are so like a lady I once knew, and am now looking for.  Are you Miss Williams?”

“My name is Williams, certainly; and you”—­something in the curly light hair, the mischievous twinkle of the eye, struck her—­“you can not be, it is scarcely possible—­David Dalziel?”