"Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy
together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not
want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not
have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad."
"You have hit on the truth," I said. "She was mad, quite mad. And mad
people always turn against those whom they--love best."
* * * * *
It is all a long time ago. I married a year later, and a year later
still Ted married again, a sensible good-humoured woman, and was just
as happy as he had been with Essie, happier even. In time he forgot her,
but I did not. She had sailed away across "perilous seas." She had
passed beyond my ken. I could only hold her memory dear. And at last she
became to me, what for so many years she had been to her lover--a dream.