Chapter 4

EVERY year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he
went to church as he had done the day his idea was born. It was on
this occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he
began to observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least
as frequent as himself. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of
the church, came and went, appealing sometimes, when they
disappeared, to a vague or to a particular recognition; but this
unfailing presence was always to be observed when he arrived and
still in possession when he departed. He was surprised, the first
time, at the promptitude with which it assumed an identity for him
- the identity of the lady whom two years before, on his
anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic
face he had had so flitting a vision. Given the time that had
passed, his recollection of her was fresh enough to make him
wonder. Of himself she had of course no impression, or rather had
had none at first: the time came when her manner of transacting
her business suggested her having gradually guessed his call to be
of the same order. She used his altar for her own purpose - he
could only hope that sad and solitary as she always struck him, she
used it for her own Dead. There were interruptions, infidelities,
all on his part, calls to other associations and duties; but as the
months went on he found her whenever he returned, and he ended by
taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her almost the
contentment he had given himself. They worshipped side by side so
often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure, so
straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in
their rites. She was younger than he, but she looked as if her
Dead were at least as numerous as his candles. She had no colour,
no sound, no fault, and another of the things about which he had
made up his mind was that she had no fortune. Always black-robed,
she must have had a succession of sorrows. People weren't poor,
after all, whom so many losses could overtake; they were positively
rich when they had had so much to give up. But the air of this
devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in any attitude, a
beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom that she
had known more kinds of trouble than one.

He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but
occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday
afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories.
There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by
side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of
these winter afternoons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware after
he had seated himself that the lady