He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she a girl of eighteen.  He could see her palpable before him now:  her slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm brown hair curling round her forehead.  Oh, how he had loved her.  For twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her.  But she had always said, ’No—­I don’t love you.  I am very fond of you; I love you as a friend; we all love you that way—­my mother, my father, my sisters.  But I can’t marry you.’  However, she married no one else, she loved no one else:  and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome guest in her father’s house; and she would talk with him, play to him, pity him; and he could hope.  Then she died.  He called one day, and they said she was ill.  After that there came a blank in his memory—­a gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.

He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth.  He remembered the pale daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all looked.  And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her writing-desk, her book-case.  He remembered a row of medicine bottles on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.

‘You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,’ her mother said.  ‘What would you like?’

On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory frame.  He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him.  She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her.  He could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it.  To own it was like owning something of herself.  He carried it home with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.

He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times; the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of herself, he felt, must linger.  To handle it, look at it, into it, behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was dissolved in joy.

The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in front of him.  That was its place; he always kept it on his chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his room.  He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time his eyes remained fixed upon it.  ’If she had married me, she wouldn’t have died.  My love, my care, would have healed her.