And yesterday they started for Wales.  It was not till after they were gone that I learnt from another newspaper paragraph that you did not go to Japan, and are in Wales.  And now I begin to suspect that Sinfi’s determination to go to Wales with Miss Wynne arose from her having suddenly learnt that you are still there.

And now, my dear Alywin, having acted as a somewhat prosaic reporter of these wonderful events, I should like to conclude my letter with a word or two about what took place when I parted from you in the streets of London.  I saw then that your sufferings had been very great, and since that time they must have been tenfold greater.  And now I rejoice to think that, of all the men in this world who have ever loved, you, through this very suffering, have been the most fortunate.  As Job’s faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been tried by the power which you call ‘circumstance’ and which Wilderspin calls ‘the spiritual world.’  All that death has to teach the mind and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms.  I, alas! have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a beloved mistress, or a beloved wife.  I have long known that it is as the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows what the word ‘love’ really means.  I have never been a reader of philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to Death—­about the final beneficence of Death—­that ’reasonable moderator and equipoise of justice,’ as Sir Thomas Browne calls him.  Equipoise of justice indeed!  He who can read with tolerance such words as these most have known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman as you and I understand it.  The Elizabethans are full of this nonsense; but where does Shakespeare, with all his immense philosophical power, ever show this temper of acquiescence?  All his impeachments of Death have the deep ring of personal feeling—­dramatist though he was.  But, what I am going to ask you is, How shall the modern materialist, who you think is to dominate the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow—­how shall he confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down?  When Moschus lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long, unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile.  Your bitter experience made you ask materialism, What comfort is there in being told that death is the very nursery of new life, and that our heirs are our very selves, if when you take leave of her who was and is your world it is ‘Vale, vale, in aeternum vale’?  The dogged resolution with which at first you fought and strove for materialism struck me greatly.  It made you almost rude to me at our last meeting.