And yet, as we sat together a few hours later in Agatha’s little room a doubt began to creep into the corners of my mind.  In her strong way she had brushed away the scandal that hung around my name.  She did not believe a word of it.  I told her of my loss of fortune.  My lunacy rather raised than lowered me in her esteem.  How then was I personally different from the man she had engaged herself to marry six months before?  I remembered our parting.  I remembered her letters.  Her presence here was proof of her unchanging regard.  But was it something more?  Was there a hope throbbing beneath that calm sweet surface to which I did not respond?  For it often happens that the more direct a woman is, the more in her feminine heart is she elusive.

Clean-built, clean-hearted, clean-eyed, of that clean complexion which suggests the open air, Eleanor impressed you with a sense of bodily and mental wholesomeness.  Her taste in dress ran in the direction of plain tailor-made gowns (I am told, by the way, that these can be fairly expensive), and shrank instinctively from the frills and fripperies to which daughters of Eve are notoriously addicted.  She spoke in a clear voice which some called hard, though I never found it so; she carried herself proudly.  Chaste in thought, frank in deed, she was a perfect specimen of the highly bred, purely English type of woman who, looking at facts squarely in the face, accepts them as facts and does not allow her imagination to dally in any atmosphere wherein they may be invested.  To this type a vow is irrefragable.  Loyalty is inherent in her like her blood.  She never changes.  What feminine inconsistencies she had at fifteen she retains at five-and-twenty, and preserves to add to the charms of her old age.  She is the exemplary wife, the great-hearted mother of children.  She has sent her sons in thousands to fight her country’s battles overseas.  Those things which lie in the outer temper of her soul she gives lavishly.  That which is hidden in her inner shrine has to be wrested from her by the one hand she loves.  Was mine that hand?

It will be perceived that I was beginning to take life seriously.

Eleanor must have also perceived something of the sort; for during our talk she said irrelevantly: 

“You’ve changed!”

“In what way?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  You’re not the same as you were.  I seem to know you better in some ways, and yet I seem to know you less.  Why is it?”

I said, “No one can go through the Valley of the Grotesque as I have done without suffering some change.”

“I don’t see why you should call it ‘the Valley of the Grotesque.’”

I smiled at her instinctive rejection of the fanciful.

“Don’t you?  Call it the Valley of the Shadow, if you like.  But don’t you think the attendant circumstances were rather mediaeval, gargoyley, Orcagnesque?  Don’t you think the whole passage lacked the dignity which one associates with the Valley of the Shadow of Death?”