a sovereign presence. He had not been a man
of numerous passions, and even in all these years
no sense had grown stronger with him than the
sense of being bereft. He had needed no priest
and no altar to make him for ever widowed. He
had done many things in the world--he had done
almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten.
He had tried to put into his existence whatever
else might take up room in it, but had failed to
make it more than a house of which the mistress
was eternally absent. She was most absent of
all on the recurrent December day that his tenacity
set apart. He had no arranged observance of it,
but his nerves made it all their own. They drove
him forth without mercy, and the goal of his
pilgrimage was far. She had been buried in a
London suburb, a part then of Nature's breast,
but which he had seen lose one after another every
feature of freshness. It was in truth during the
moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the
place least. They looked at another image,
they opened to another light. Was it a credible
future? Was it an incredible past? Whatever
the answer it was an immense escape from the
actual.

It's true that if there were n't other dates than
this there were other memories; and by the time
George Stransom was fifty-five such memories had

-6-