The years had heaped themselves up between them, between her at the Hague, in Rome, in Brussels, and him in America, when she was an elegant young society-woman, he the workmen's friend and brother, their comrade who yearned to know and understand them. While she had danced and flirted in the ball-rooms of Rome, he had laboured in the docks, gone down the black shafts of the coal-mines. And all this which had really happened seemed unreal to her, a dream, a remote nightmare, by the side of that childish romance, those fairy visions of yesterday! And yet it had all happened, it had all happened. They had never been allowed to meet each other, not even when they had been brought near each other—on the Riviera, in Brussels—as by an unconscious power! They had not been allowed to meet until now, late, very late, too late . . . Oh, is it ever given too late, that blessed boon, to live at last, to find at last?
And they had both made mistakes. She had made her mistakes: her brief passion for Henri, the sudden kindling of the senses of a frivolous, bored and idle woman; then the marriage: mistake upon mistake, nothing but waste, waste, waste of her precious life. And he had made mistakes too: he had dreamed of being the brother of those men, a fellow-worker and comrade, and he had not become their brother. Oh, if they had once been allowed to know and find each other, in the years when they
