being nothing else for them to do a long contemplation of the likeness completed in his emotions what the letter had begun he loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life he had thought of her but at distant intervals during the twenty years since that parting occurred and only as somebody he could have wedded yet now the times of youthful friendship with her in which he had learned every note of her innocent nature up into a yearning and passionate attachment by regret beyond words that kiss which had offended his dignity which she had so given him before her consciousness of womanhood had been awakened what he would have offered to have a quarter of it now was almost angry with himself for h the his feelings of this night so strong were they towards the lost young how senseless of me he said as he lay in his lonely bed she had been another man s wife almost the whole time since he was from her and now she was a corpse yet the absurdity did not make his grief the less and the consciousness of the almost radiant purity of this new sprung affection for a flown spirit forbade him to check it the flesh was absent altogether it was love and refined to its highest he had felt nothing like it before the next afternoon he went down to the club not his large club where the men hardly spoke to each other but the homely one where they told stories of an afternoon and were not ashamed to confess among themselves to personal weaknesses and follies knowing well that such secrets would go no farther but he could not tell this so and was the story that to convey it in words would have been as hard as to cage a perfume they observed his altered manner and said he was in love admitted that he a young man of forty was and there it ended when he reached home he looked out of his bedroom window and began to consider in what direction from where he stood that darling little figure lay it was straight across there under the young pale moon the symbol signified well the divinity of the silver bow was not more pure than she the lost had been under that moon was the island of ancient and on the island a house framed from to chimney top like the isle itself of stone inside the window the moonlight her winding sheet lay reached only by the faint noises inherent in the isle the of the in the the of the tides in the bay and the grumbling of the currents in the never race he began to divine the truth the departed one though she had come short of inspiring a passion had yet possessed a absent from her rivals without which it seemed that a fixed and full rounded constancy to a woman could not flourish in him like his own her family had been for centuries � from roman british times hence in her nature the well beloved as in his was some mysterious sucked from the isle otherwise a instinct necessary to the absolute of a pair thus though he might never love a woman of the island race for lack in her of the desired refinement he could not love long a � a woman other than of the island race for her lack of this of character such was s view of things another fancy of his an artist s superstition merely may be mentioned the like some other local families suggested a roman more or less on the stock of the their features recalled those of the italian to any one as familiar as he was with them and there were evidences that the roman had been and in and near this comer of britain tradition urged that a temple to once stood at the top of the roman road leading up into the isle and possibly one to the of the this what so natural as that the true star of his soul would be found nowhere but in one of the old island breed after dinner his old friend came in to smoke and when they had talked a little ii a young man of forty while alluded casually to some place at which they would meet on the morrow i sha n t be there said but you promised i yes but i shall be at the island � looking at a dead woman s grave as he spoke his eyes turned and remained fixed on a table near followed the direction of his glance to a photograph on a stand is that she he asked yes rather a affair then acknowledged it she s the only sweetheart i ever alfred he said because she s the only one i ought to have cared for that s just the fool i have always been but if she s dead and buried you can go to her grave at any time as well as now to keep up the sentiment i don t know that she s buried but to morrow � the academy night of all days why go then i don t care about the academy � you are our only inspired you are our or rather our you are almost the only man of the well beloved this generation who has been able to mould and forms living enough to draw the idle public away from the popular paintings into the usually deserted lecture room and people who have seen your last pieces of stuff say there has been nothing like them since sixteen hundred and � since the of the great race lived and died whenever that was well then for the sake of others you ought not to rush off to that forgotten sea rock just when you are 