"What the eye does n't see, darling!" Maurice tells her, "... the heart does n't grieve. What we never know we never miss. But now we 're going to make up for what might have been, are n't we?"
Pam says yes, they are. "And oh," she says, "if you had n't found me you might have found somebody else, Morrie dear, do you think it possible that I may be standing in the way of somebody you don't know at all ... that you might love better?"
"Very likely you are, dear!" Maurice says, acting Job's comforter. "But anyway, I 'm ready to risk you, and take my chance of what may be for what is."
And this time Pam is ready to risk it too, and does not tell the Spawer, as once she told Ginger:
"There must be no chance in love!"
CHAPTER XLVI
One bright morning in late September, when the sky dreamed as blue as June, and the sun shone August, a stranger passed through into the churchyard by the lich gate, and his Reverence the Vicar, having received telepathic intimation of his presence, along one or other of the invisible slender filaments that connect the Vicarage with the churchyard, emerged shortly from his retreat, like a fine full-bodied spider, and captured his prize by the side wicket, with a "Ha!" of agreeable greeting.
"A stranger within our gates!" he observed, in courteous surprise, rocking to and fro upon his legs in the pathway, and balancing the ebony staff across both palms, as though he were weighing theological propositions. He encompassed the sky with a comprehensive circle of ferrule, and thrusting up a rapt nose to appreciation of its beneficent blue, "You bring glorious weather!" he said.
The stranger acknowledged with marked politeness that the weather was as his Reverence had been pleased to state. He was an elderly man, soberly habited in black, and a compression of mouth that seemed to betoken one whose office exacted of him either deference or discretion, or perhaps both.
"A pilgrim to the old heathen centre of Ullbrig?" his Reverence inquired. "... An antiquarian at all? A connoisseur of tablets? or a rubber of brasses?—in which case we 've nothing to show you."