Here she checked her animal, and sat for a moment with closed eyes,
the evening sunlight pouring over her. Very strangely she was
trembling from head to foot, as if in the presence of a vision upon
which she dared not look. She had returned as she had always meant
to return--but ah, the dreary desert spaces and the cruel roughness
of the road! Her husband's words uttered only a few hours before
came back upon her as she stood there. "We may never reach the top
of the world now," No, they would never reach it. Had anyone ever
done so, she wondered drearily? But yet they had been near it
once--nearer than many. Did that count for nothing?
It seemed to her that aeons had passed over her since last she had
stood beneath that tree. She had been a girl then, ardent and full
of courage. Now she was a woman, old and very tired, and there was
nothing left in life. It was almost as if she had ceased to live.
But yet she had come back to the starting-point, and here, as if
standing beside a grave and reading the inscription to one long
dead, she opened her eyes in the last glow of the sunshine to read
the words which Burke had cut into the bare wood on the evening of
his wedding-day. She remembered how she had waited for him, the
tumult of doubt, of misgiving, in her soul, how she had wished he
would not linger in that desolate place.
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