Tears and laughter well compounded make the sweetest joy; grief and joy the truest happiness; happiness and pain the grandest soul, and none of these may be described.
We may analyze them, and may take them part from part; but, like love, they cannot be compounded.

We may know all the component parts, but when we try to create these great emotions in description, we lack the subtle compounding flux to unite the ingredients, and after all is done, we have simply said that black is black and that white is white.
Next day, in the morning, Madge and I started for our new home in France.
We rode up the hill down which poor Dolcy took her last fatal plunge, and when we reached the crest, we paused to look back.

Standing on the battlements, waving a kerchief in farewell to us, was the golden-crowned form of a girl.

Soon she covered her face with her kerchief, and we knew she was weeping Then we, also, wept as we turned away from the fair picture; and since that far-off morning--forty long, long years ago--we have not seen the face nor heard the voice of our sweet, tender friend.
Forty years! What an eternity it is if we tear it into minutes! L'ENVOI The fire ceases to burn; the flames are sucked back into the earth; the doe's blood has boiled away; the caldron cools, and my shadowy friends--so real to me--whom I love with a passionate tenderness beyond my power to express, have sunk into the dread black bank of the past, and my poor, weak wand is powerless to recall them for the space of even one fleeting moment.

So I must say farewell to them; but all my life I shall carry a heart full of tender love and pain for the fairest, fiercest, gentlest, weakest, strongest of them all--Dorothy Vernon.
MALCOLM POSSIBLY IN ERROR Malcolm Vernon is the only writer on the life of Dorothy Vernon who speaks of Rutland Castle.