“Yet, when I would command thee hence,
Thou mockest at the vain pretence,
Murmuring in mine ear a song
Once loved, alas! forgotten long;
And on my brow I feel a kiss
That I would rather die than miss.”—Mary Coleridge.
“Well?” Julius asked me, as we strolled across the pastures that skirted the main forest, “and does it seem anywhere familiar to you—the three of us together again? You recall—how much?” A rather wistful smile passed over his face, but the eyes were grave. He was in earnest if ever man was. “She doesn’t seem wholly a stranger to you?”
My mind searched carefully for words. To refer to any of my recent impressions was difficult, even painful, and frank discussion of my friend’s wife impossible—though, probably, there was nothing Julius would not have understood and even welcomed.
“I—cannot deny,” I began, “that somewhere—in my imagination, perhaps, there seems——”
He interrupted me at once. “Don’t suppress the imaginative pictures—they’re memory. To deny them is only to forget again. Let them come freely in you.”