Within doors nothing was changed, and my hand would have dropped without surprise into her welcoming clasp. It was luncheon-time, and Grancy led me at once to the dining-room, where the walls, the furniture, the very plate and porcelain, seemed a mirror in which a moment since her face had been reflected. I wondered whether Grancy, under the recovered tranquility of his smile, concealed the same sense of her nearness, saw perpetually between himself and the actual her bright unappeasable ghost. He spoke of her once or twice, in an easy incidental way, and her name seemed to hang in the air after he had uttered it like a chord that continues to vibrate. If he felt her presence it was evidently as an enveloping medium, the moral atmosphere in which he breathed. I had never before known how completely the dead may survive.

After luncheon we went for a long walk through the autumnal fields and woods, and dusk was falling when we re-entered the house. Grancy led the way to the library, where, at this hour, his wife had always welcomed us back to a bright fire and a cup of tea. The room faced the west, and held a clear light of its own after the rest of the house had grown dark. I remembered how young she had looked in this pale gold light, which irradiated her eyes and hair or silhouetted her girlish outline as she passed before the windows. Of all the rooms the library was most peculiarly hers; and here I felt that her nearness might take visible shape. Then, all in a moment, as Grancy opened the door, the feeling vanished and a kind of resistance met me on the threshold. I looked about me. Was the room changed? Had some desecrating hand effaced the traces of her presence? No; here too the setting was undisturbed. My feet sank into the same deep-piled Daghestan; the book-shelves took the firelight on the same rows of rich subdued bindings; her armchair stood in its old place near the tea-table; and from the opposite wall her face confronted me.

Her face—but was it hers? I moved nearer and stood looking up at the portrait. Grancy’s glance had followed mine, and I heard him move to my side.

“You see a change in it?” he said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means—that five years have passed.”

“Over her?”

“Why not? Look at me!” He pointed to his grey hair and furrowed temples. “What do you think kept her so young? It was happiness! But now—” He looked up at her with infinite tenderness. “I liked her better so,”he said. “It’s what she would have wished.”

“Have wished?”

“That we should grow old together. Do you think she would have wanted to be left behind?”

I stood speechless, my gaze travelling from his worn, grief-beaten features to the painted face above. It was not furrowed like his; but a veil of years seemed to have descended on it. The bright hair had lost its elasticity, the cheek its clearness, the brow its light: the whole woman had waned. Grancy laid his hand on my arm. “You don’t like it?” he said sadly.

“Like it? I—I’ve lost her!” I burst out.

“And I’ve found her,” he answered.

“In that?” I cried, with a reproachful gesture.

“Yes; in that.” He swung round on me almost definatly. “The other had become a sham, a lie! This is the way she would have looked—does look, I mean. Claydon ought to know, oughtn’t he?”