Golden lilies swung their censers softly, and the exquisite incense perfumed the dusk.  Fairy lamp-bearers starred the night with glimmering radiance, faintly seen afar.  A cricket chirped just outside the window and a ghostly white moth circled around the evening lamp.

Roger sat by the table, with Keats’s letters to his beloved Fanny open before him.  The letter to Constance, so strangely brought back after all the intervening years, lay beside the book.  The ink was faded and the paper was yellow, but his father’s love, for a woman not his mother, stared the son full in the face and was not to be denied.

Was this all, or—?  His thought refused to go further.  Constance North had died, by her own hand, four days after the letter was written.  What might not have happened in four days?  In one day, Columbus found a world.  In another, electricity was discovered.  In one day, one hour, even, some immeasurable force moving according to unseen law might sway the sun and set all the stars to reeling madly through the unutterable midnights of the universe.  And in four days?  Ah, what had happened in those four days?

[Sidenote:  A Recurring Question]

The question had haunted him since the night he read the letter, when he was reading to Barbara and had unwittingly come upon it.  Constance was dead and Laurence Austin was dead, but their love lived on.  The grave was closed against it, and in neither heaven nor hell could it find an abiding-place.  Ghostly and forbidding, it had sent Constance to haunt Miriam’s troubled sleep, it had filled Ambrose North’s soul with cruel doubt and foreboding, and had now come back to Roger and Barbara, to ask eternal questions of the one, and stir the heart of the other to new depths of pain.

He had not seen Barbara since that night and she had sent no message.  No beacon light in the window across the way said “come.”  The sword that had lain, keen-edged and cruel, between Constance and her lover, had, by a single swift stroke, changed everything between her daughter and his son.

Not that Barbara herself was less beautiful or less dear.  Roger had missed her more than he realised.  When her lovely, changing face had come between his eyes and the musty pages of his law books, while the disturbing Bascom pup cavorted merrily around the office, unheard and unheeded, Roger had ascribed it to the letter that had forced them apart.

* * * * *

The woollen slippers muffled Miss Mattie’s step so that Roger did not hear her enter the room.  Preoccupied and absorbed, he was staring vacantly out of the window, when a strong, capable hand swooped down beside him, gathering up the book and the letter.

[Sidenote:  Tremendous Power]

“I don’t know what it is about your readin’, Roger,” complained his mother, “that makes you blind and deaf and dumb and practically paralysed.  Your pa was the same way.  Reckon I’ll read a piece myself and see what it is that’s so affectin’.  It ain’t a very big book, but it seems to have tremendous power.”