She, Emily—­Emily Athel, as she joyed to write herself—­moved in her new sphere like a spirit humbled by victory over fate.  It was a mild winter; the Surrey hills were tender against the brief daylight, and gardens breathed the freshness of evergreens.  When the sun trembled over the landscape for a short hour, Emily loved to stray as far as that hollow on the heath where she had sat with Wilfrid years ago, and heard him for the first time speak freely of his aims and his hopes.  That spot was sacred; as she stood there beneath the faint blue of the winter sky, all the exquisite sadness of life, the memory of those whom death had led to his kindly haven, the sorrows of new-born love, the dear heartache for woe passed into eternity, touched the deepest fountains of her nature and made dim her eyes.  She would not have had life other than it was given to her, for she had learned the secrets of infinite passion in the sunless valleys of despair.

She rested.  In the last few months she had traversed a whole existence; repose was needful that she might assimilate all her new experiences and range in due order the gifts which joy had lavishly heaped upon her.  The skies of the south, the murmur of blue seas on shores of glorious name, the shrines of Art, the hallowed scenes where earth’s greatest have loved and wrought, these were no longer a dream with her bodily eyes she had looked upon Greece and Italy, and to have done so was a consecration, it cast a light upon her brows.  ‘Talk to me of Rome;’ those were always her words when Wilfrid came to her side in the evening.  ‘Talk to me of Rome, as you alone can.’  And as Wilfrid recalled their life in the world’s holy of holies, she closed her eyes for the full rapture of the inner light, and her heart sang praise.

Wilfrid was awed by his blessedness.  There were times when he scarcely dared to take in his own that fine-moulded hand which was the symbol of life made perfect; Emily uttered thoughts which made him fear to profane her purity by his touch.  She realised to the uttermost his ideal of womanhood, none the less so that it seemed no child would be born of her to trouble the exclusiveness of their love.  He clad her in queenly garments and did homage at her feet.  Her beauty was all for him, for though Emily could grace any scene she found no pleasure in society, and the hours of absence from home were to Wilfrid full of anxiety to return.  All their plans were for solitude; life was too short for more than the inevitable concessions to the outside world.

But one morning in February, Emily’s eye fell upon an announcement in the newspaper which excited in her a wish to go up to town.  Among the list of singers at a concert to be given that day she had caught the name of Miss Beatrice Redwing.  It was Saturday; Wilfrid had no occasion for leaving home and already they had enjoyed in advance the two unbroken days.

‘But I should indeed like to hear her,’ Emily said, ’and she seems to sing so rarely.’