East of the Shadows

Also, she remembered a young secretary in Berlin whom they had known very intimately, Phil L'Estrange. Every one had called him Phil with the exception of her father, who had invariably addressed him as Philip, in spite of the young man's laughing assurance that he did not answer to the name.

"How could she have done it?" she murmured half aloud. "How could she have done it?" Twenty-two years of waiting! What a love this man must have given to the other Philippa--a love so strong that it dominated weakness of the body, and even of mind, and through all the long years burnt on with the same clear flame of youth.

Would he die now, this man who had waited so long?--would he die happy, satisfied that his love had come to him again? It was an absorbing thought. Why did these coincidences happen? Were they coincidences? Here was she, a stranger, with, it would seem, a human life hanging on her coming--at least it had appeared so this morning, when her voice had roused him from the lethargy of weakness which was drifting him out of life. And if he died, what would his meeting be with that Philippa who had passed before him into the Unknown, the land where there was no marriage or giving in marriage?

Yet, in that land of which we speak so glibly and picture each of us according to our personal fancy, and of which we are so absolutely ignorant--in that future state there surely must be love. Was a wonderful human love like this to come to an abrupt end--to be left behind with the body's frail shell? Surely not. Surely, although human, it held too much of the divine to perish with the earthly clay; and yet, if the love of Francis Heathcote passed with his spirit, how would he meet Phil? or, rather, how would she meet him? Would she be changed while he remained unaltered? Would heaven itself be heaven for him without her love? Oh, the awful mystery of the future life!

And--if he did not die? She stopped abruptly, and stood quite still as the recollection of the words which the old woman had spoken returned to her mind. "Now you have come, and he will be content."

What did she mean? What had she, the living Philippa Harford, to do with Francis Heathcote? a man of whose very existence she had been ignorant, known nothing, until yesterday--nothing.

And if clear reason asserted itself in his shadowed mind, as seemed possible, how could the truth be explained to him?