East of the Shadows

by Mrs. Hubert Barclay

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?

She walked on again overwhelmed by the difficulty of her position. Unthinkingly—unwittingly—she had, in the pitying impulse of the moment, drawn a fellow-soul back to earth and life. If she had not been there he must have died—so much was certain; and yet——

So engrossed had she been in her thoughts that she had paid no heed to the road along which she passed, but now, as she lifted her eyes and gazed round her, this way and that, as if seeking some solution of the problem that confronted her, she found that she had reached the moor.

Before her stretched a wide expanse of earth and sky, lit into splendour by the rays of the sun which was sinking, a ball of fire, into a sea of flame. So calm was the distant water that its unruffled surface mirrored the glory of the sky above it in wonderful tones of scarlet and orange and palest rose. The moor itself, brilliant with bell heather, seemed a magnificent robe clothing the world in regal purple; while across it, winding like a ribbon laid lightly over its richness, ran the road—further and further into the distance until it vanished from sight at the meeting-place of land and water. Philippa gazed entranced—her perplexities forgotten—her whole being stirred—uplifted by the beauty of the scene.