And then suddenly, as is the way with me when I am at the bottom, my spirits bounded upward. Alicia would come back to me, I felt in a sudden surge of assurance. At that moment I felt sure that she was thinking of me, that she was yearning to return. And before I knew it, I was blocking in magnificent plans for her education, for making a splendid woman of her, even though she already seemed perfect, of supplementing nature's handiwork with all the force that was in me. I saw her resplendent, a shining creature, the woman of my dreams! What a florid designer is hope!
But why should she have been taken from me so abruptly? The vast mystery of life encompassed me again like a shell, impenetrable—a carapace through which nature must supply the openings—and she had evidently not supplied them. Would Dibdin never come with his policeman?
Books, for so long my mainstay and support, were now useless to me. I turned over many volumes idly but my mind no longer reacted to that old and magical alchemy. The volume of Epictetus that Dibdin had fingered might have been a seed catalogue, so remote it seemed and so null. I was now a ghost among my books: I was plunged in "The Woods of Westermain," and my memory flung me the lines:
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form;
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
It was clear. I must toss my heart up with the lark to fare fairly, even though my pain was great.
Late that afternoon; Dibdin returned, bringing Sergeant Cullum.
That excellent policeman gave me more hope than any one, excepting my own heart, had yet succeeded in doing. He insisted upon being made privy to all the circumstances, to which he listened, his broad shaven face turned ceilingward, with the rapt air of a mystic, expecting momentarily that lightning flash of inspiration that would reveal all. Then he asked to be allowed to wander by himself throughout the house, over which he went pointing and sniffing like some well-trained hound. In the end he declared himself satisfied.
"Now give me a little time," he said.
"But what means—how do you go to work?" I asked, nettled that he should see possibilities regarding Alicia that I had overlooked.
"I swear, Mr. Byrd, I don't know," he answered reverently. "I wait for guidance."