How else should we retire apart
With the hoarded memories of the heart?
—Browning.
Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
—Tennyson.
It was a lovely morning in May, when Tudor Hereward sat, wrapped in his gray silk dressing-gown, reclining in his resting-chair, on the front piazza at Cloud Cliffs.
He had had a hard fight with death, and had barely come out of it with his life.
Physicians and friends alike ascribed his illness to nervous shock upon a system already run down under the long-continued pressure of work and worry.
He was convalescent now, yet he seemed the mere shadow of his former vigorous manhood.