"Ah—slowly moving! That's it! If I could get the pace the way you seem to give it to me when you tell me all those things … "

He leaned his elbows on the scattered pages and stared at her across the table. The long folds of the green velvet table cover drooped to the floor between them, and from her shadowy place above the mantel Miss Lorburn looked down meditatively on the young pair who were trying to call her back to life. Halo Tarrant, facing him, her dark hair parted on her temples, her thin face full of shadowy hollows, seemed in the shuttered summer light, almost as ghostly as Miss Lorburn. "I wonder—" Vance broke out, laying down his pen to look at her. "Have you had to give up things too …  ?"

"Give up things …  ?"

"I mean: a vision of life."

"Oh, that—!" She gave a faint laugh. "Who doesn't? Luckily one can recapture it sometimes—in another form." She pointed to the manuscript. "That's exactly your theme, isn't it?"

He nodded. The allusion sent him back to his work. He did not know why he had strayed from it to ask her that question—the first personal question he had ever put to her. But there were moments when the shape of her face, the curves of her hair and brows, reminded him so startlingly of the thwarted lady above the mantel that the comparison sent a pang through him. And then Mrs. Tarrant would burst into banter and laughter, would flame with youthful contradictions and enthusiasms, and he would wonder how he could have seen in her any resemblance to the sad spinster who had leaned on winter evenings on the green velvet table, reading Coleridge.

"Yes—but it was Coleridge; don't forget that! It wasn't The Saints' Rest or The Book of Martyrs." That had been one of Halo's first admonitions. Vance was not to make a predestined old maid or a pious recluse out of his Alida. She must be a creature apt for love, but somehow caught in the cruel taboos and inhibitions of her day, and breaking through them too late to find compensation except under another guise: the guise of poetry, dreams, visions… . That was how they saw her.