CHAPTER XXV.
"IT HAS GONE VERY DEEP" When you depart from me, sorrow abides and happiness takes his leave.
-- SHAKESPEARE.
Fulfil the perfection of long-suffering--be thou patient.
-- Teaching of Buddha.
All his life long Malcolm never spoke of the hours that followed that fateful interview down by the Pool, when he was as one who had just received his baptism of fire--when he was scorched through and through with that new and terrible agony.
"He will take it hardly," Dinah had said to herself.

"His nature is intense, and he will suffer more than most men;" and she was right.
Malcolm did suffer cruelly.
He had spoken his parting words to Elizabeth with outward calmness, though his lips were blanched and his features drawn with pain; for he was a gentleman, and noblesse oblige, and why should he make her suffer when she had done him no wrong?
"I am not the only man who has been denied his heart's desire," he had said to her in a dull, lifeless voice, and in this he was certainly right.

All are not winners in the race; many fail to attain their goal, and retire baffled and disheartened from the contest; but few suffer as Malcolm Herrick did, and though he did not curse the day he was born, as Job did, the whole plan and purpose of his life seemed frustrated and the future a hopeless blank.
And the fault was his own! Even in his most despairing moments he never ceased to tell himself that she had never encouraged him--never held out her woman's sceptre for him to touch; and even when she had been most sweet and winsome, she had not abridged the distance between them, nor, in her noble sincerity and friendship, attempted to draw him closer.
No, it was he who had been a blind fool, and he must pay the penalty of his madness.

The gates of his earthly paradise had closed behind him for ever.

He could hear them clanging in the distance; and the golden bells of his city of dreams were chiming "Nevermore--oh, nevermore!" "His City of dreams--what a good name!" thought he; and through the long summer days he had dwelt there like a king.