London’s Whitechapel Countess glided before him like a candle in the fog.

He had accused her as the creature destroying Romance.  Was it gold in place of gilding, absolute upper human life that the ridiculous object at his heels over London proposed instead of delirious brilliancies, drunken gallops, poison-syrups,—­puffs of a young man’s vapours?

There was Madge and the donkey basket-trap ahead on the road to the house, bearing proof of the veiled had-been:  signification of a might-have-been.  Why not a possible might-be?  Still the might-be might be.  Looking on this shaven earth and sky of March with the wrathful wind at work, we know that it is not the end:  a day follows for the world.  But looking on those blown black funeral sprays, and the wrinkled chill waters, and the stare of the Esslemont house-windows, it has an appearance of the last lines of our written volume:  dead Finis.  Not death; fouler, the man alive seeing himself stretched helpless for the altering of his deeds; a coffin carrying him; the fatal whiteheaded sacerdotal official intoning his aims on the march to front, the drear craped files of the liveried, salaried mourners over his failure, trooping at his heels.

Frontward was the small lake’s grey water, rearward an avenue of limes.

But the man alive, if but an inch alive, can so take his life in his clutch, that he does alter, cleanse, recast his deeds:—­it is known; priests proclaim it, philosophers admit it.

Can he lay his clutch on another’s life, and wring out the tears shed, the stains of the bruises, recollection of the wrongs?

Contemplate the wounded creature as a woman.  Then, what sort of woman is she?  She was once under a fascination—­ludicrously, painfully, intensely like a sort of tipsy poor puss, the trapped hare tossed to her serpent; and thoroughly reassured for a few caresses, quite at home, caged and at home; and all abloom with pretty ways, modest pranks, innocent fondlings.  Gobbled, my dear!

It is the doom of the innocents, a natural fate.  Smother the creature with kindness again, show we are a point in the scale above that old coiler snake—­which broke no bones, bit not so very deep;—­she will be, she ought to be, the woman she was.  That is, if she was then sincere, a dose of kindness should operate happily to restore the honeymoony fancies, hopes, trusts, dreams, all back, as before the honeymoon showed the silver crook and shadowy hag’s back of a decaying crescent.  And true enough, the poor girl’s young crescent of a honeymoon went down sickly-yellow rather early.  It can be renewed.  She really was at that time rather romantic.  She became absurd.  Romance is in her, nevertheless.  She is a woman of mettle:  she is probably expecting to be wooed.  One makes a hash of yesterday’s left dish, but she may know no better.  ’Add a pickle,’ as Chummy Potts used to say.  The dish is rendered savoury by a slight expenditure of attentions, just a dab of intimated soft stuff.