This was the coming out, and he was already radiant with happiness, oblivious of suffering, hopeful of the future. It was enough, he would not probe it, he would not peer into the dark corners of his prospect; he would simply realize that his soul had been lost, that it had been found by Lettice, and that it was hers by right of trover, as well as by absolute surrender.

The mid-day sun shone in at his window and tempted him to the verandah outside. Here he found one of those chairs, delightful to invalids and lazy men, which are constructed of a few crossed pieces of wood and a couple of yards of sacking, giving nearly all the luxury of a hammock without its disturbing element of insecurity. And by its side, wonderful, to relate, there was a box of cigarettes and some matches.

Since they were there, he might as well smoke one. His last smoke was seven or eight months ago--quite long enough to give a special relish to this particular roll of Turkish tobacco.

As he lay back in his hammock chair, and sent one ring chasing another to the roof of the verandah, he heard a step on the gravel beneath him.

Lettice, with a basket in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other, was collecting flowers and leaves for her vases. Unwilling to leave him too much alone, until she saw how he would bear his solitude, she had come out into the garden by a door at the other end of the house, and presently, seeing him in the verandah, approached with a smile.

"Do I look as if I were making myself at home?" he said.

"Quite."

"As soon as I began to smoke, all kinds of things came crowding into my mind."

"Not unpleasant things, I hope?" She said this quickly, being indeed most afraid lest he should be tempted to dwell on the disagreeable past.

"No, almost all pleasant. And there are things I want to say to you--that I must say to you, very soon. Do you think I can take for granted all you have done, and all you are doing for me? Let me come down and join you!"

"No!" she said, with a great deal of firmness in her gesture and tone.

"You must not do anything of the kind until the doctor has seen you; and besides, we can speak very well here."

The verandah was only a few feet above the ground, so that Lettice's head was almost on a level with his own.

"There is no difficulty about speaking," she went on, "but I want you to let me have the first word, instead of the last. This is something I wanted to say to you, but I did not know how to manage it before. It is really very important that you should not fatigue or excite yourself by talking, and the doctor will tell you so when he comes. Now if you think that you have anything at all to thank me for, you will promise not to speak to me on any personal matters, not even your own intentions for the future, for one clear month from to-day! Don't say it is impossible, because, you see, it is as much as my place (as nurse) is worth to listen to you! If you will promise, I can stay; and if you will not promise, I must go away."

"That is very hard!"

"But it is very necessary. You promise?"

"Have I any choice? I promise."

"Thank you!" She said this very earnestly, and looked him in the eyes with a smile which was worth a f.a.ggot of promises.

"But you don't expect me to be deaf and dumb all the time?" said Alan.

"No, of course not! I have been told that you ought to be kept as cheerful as possible, and I mean to do what I can to make you so. Do you like to be read to!"

"Yes, very much."

"Then I will read to you as long as you please, and write your letters, and--if there were any game----"

"Ah, now, if by good luck you knew chess?"

"I do know chess. I played my father nearly every evening at Angleford."

"What a charming discovery! And that reminds me of something. Is there any reason why I should not write to Mr. Larmer? He has some belongings of mine, for one thing, which I should like him to send me, including a set of chess-men."

"No reason at all. But you ought not to write or talk of business, if you can help it, until you are quite strong."

"Well, then, I won't. I will ask him to send what I want in a cab; and then, when I am declared capable of managing my own affairs, I will go into town and see him. But the fact is, that I really feel as well as ever I did in my life!"

"You may feel it, but it is not the case."

And later in the day, Alan was obliged to confess that he had boasted too soon, for there was a slight return of fever, and the doctor whom Lettice had called in was more emphatic than she had been as to the necessity for complete rest of mind and body.

So for the next week he was treated quite as an invalid, to his great disgust. Then he fairly turned the corner, and things began to change for the better again. Lettice read to him, talked, played chess, found out his tastes in music and in art (tastes in some respects a little primitive, but singularly fine and true, in spite of their want of training), and played his favorite airs for him on the piano--some of Mendelssohn's plaintive Lieder, the quainter and statelier measures of Corelli and Scarlatti, s.n.a.t.c.hes of Schumann and Grieg, and several older and simpler melodies, for most of which he had to ask by humming a few bars which had impressed themselves on his memory.

As the month wore itself out, the success of Lettice's experiment was in a fair way of being justified. She had charmed the evil spirit of despair from Alan's breast, and had won him back to manly resistance and courageous effort. With returning bodily strength came a greater robustness of mind, and a resolution--borrowed, perhaps, in the first instance, from his companion--to be stronger than his persecutors, and rise superior to his troubles.

In the conversations which grew out of their daily readings, Lettice was careful to draw him as much as possible into literary discussions and criticisms, and Alan found himself dwelling to an appreciative listener on certain of his own ideas on poetic and dramatic methods. There is but a step from methods to instances; and when Lettice came into his room one morning--she never showed herself before mid-day--she saw with delight on the paper before him an unmistakable stream of verses meandering down the middle of the sheet.

He had set to work! Then he was saved--saved from himself, and from the ghouls that harbor in a desolate and outraged mind.

If, beyond this, you ask me how she had gained her end, and done the good thing on which she had set her heart, I cannot tell you, any more than I could make plain the ways in which nature works to bring all her great and marvelous mysteries to pa.s.s. Lettice's achievement, like her resolution, argued both heart and intellect. Alan would not have yielded to anyone else, and he yielded to her because he loved her with the feelings and the understanding together. She had mastered his affections and his intelligence at the same time: she left him to hunger and thirst up to the moment of his abject abas.e.m.e.nt, and then she came unasked, unhoped, from her towering height to his lowest deep, and gave him--herself!

"Do you remember," he said to her once, when he had got her to talk of her successful story, "that bit of Browning which you quote near the end? Did you ever think that I could be infatuated enough to apply the words to myself, and take comfort from them in my trouble?"

She blushed and trembled as he looked at her for an answer.

"I meant you to do it!".

"And I knew you meant it!" he said, not without a dangerous touch of triumph in his voice. "If I were a little bolder than I am, I would carry you to another page of the poet whom we love, and ask if you ever remembered the words of Constance--words that you did not quote----"

Ten times more deeply she blushed at this, knowing almost by instinct the lines of which he thought. Had he not asked her to read "In a Balcony" to him the night before, and had she not found it impossible to keep her voice from trembling when she read Constance's pa.s.sionate avowal of her love?

"I know the thriftier way Of giving--haply, 'tis the wiser way; Meaning to give a treasure, I might dole Coin after coin out (each, as that were all, With a new largess still at each despair), And force you keep in sight the deed, preserve Exhaustless till the end my part and yours, My giving and your taking; both our joys Dying together. Is it the wiser way?

I choose the simpler; I give all at once.

Know what you have to trust to trade upon!

Use it, abuse it--anything, but think Hereafter, 'Had I known she loved me so, And what my means, I might have thriven with it.'

This is your means. I give you all myself."

And in truth, that was the gift which Lettice offered to him--a gift of herself without stint or grudging, a gift complete, open-handed, to be measured by his acceptance, not limited by her reservation, Alan knew it; knew that absolute generosity was the essence of her gift, and that this woman, so far above him in courage, and self-command, and purity, scorned to close her fingers on a single coin of the wealth which she held out to him. And he, like Norbert, answered reverently: "I take you and thank G.o.d."

For just because he knew it, and was penetrated to the core by her munificence, he took the draught of love as from a sacred chalice, which a meaner nature would have grasped as a festal goblet. He might have grasped it thus, and the sacramental wine would have been a Circe's potion, and Lettice would have given her gift in vain. But nature does not so miscalculate her highest moods. "Spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues." Lettice's giving was an act of faith, and her faith was justified.

This was the true source of Alan's self-respect, and from self-respect there came a strength greater and more enduring than he had ever known before. Redeemed from the material baseness of his past when he changed the prison cell for Lettice's enn.o.bling presence, he was now saved from the mental and moral feebleness to which he might have sunk by the ordeal through which his soul had pa.s.sed.

Lettice felt that her work was accomplished, and she was supremely happy. When Clara Graham kept her promise, and came to see her friend--though she had not been able to bring her husband with her--she was struck by the blithe gaiety of Lettice's looks and words.

"There is no need to tell me that you are satisfied!" she said, kissing the tender cheeks, and gazing with wistful earnestness into the eyes that so frankly and bravely met her own.

"Satisfied?" Lettice answered, with something like a sigh. "I never dreamed that satisfaction could be so complete."

When Alan came in, and Clara, who had expected to see a face lined and marred with sorrow, found that he too had caught the radiance of unblemished happiness, she felt that Lettice had not spent her strength in vain. And she went home and renewed her efforts to make her husband see things as she saw them, and to give Alan Walcott his countenance in the literary world.

But that was a task of no slight difficulty. James Graham had always believed Walcott guilty of a barbarous attack on his wife; he thought that he had been lightly punished, and would not admit that he was to be received when he came out of prison as though he had never been sent there. When Clara told him of Lettice's audacity he was terribly shocked--as indeed were all who heard the story--and his resentment against Alan increased. The news that they were happy together did not produce the good effect upon his temper which Clara thought it might have done.

It was Lettice herself who tackled Mrs. Hartley. She wrote her a long and candid letter, very apologetic as regarded her conduct in Italy, but quite the opposite when she spoke of what she had done since she came back to London. The answer was short, but much to the point.