"I have thought it well over. I could go on practising when I came back to England; and in the meantime----I suppose you would have to take me abroad, Nan: I could not well take you," he said with a grim sort of jocularity, which she could not help seeing was painful to him. "If it did you good, as Burrows thinks it would, I should be quite prepared to give up everything else."

"Give up everything else," Nan murmured. "For me?"

He drew a long breath. "Well, yes. The fact is I have lost some of my old interest in my work, compared with other things. I have come to this, Nan--I would let my career go to the winds, if by doing so, I could give you back strength and happiness. Tell me what I can do: that is all. I have caused you a great deal of misery, I know: if there is any way in which I can----atone----"

He did not go on, and for a few moments Nan could not speak. There was color enough in her cheeks now, and light in her eyes, but she turned away from him, and would not let him see her face.

"I want to think over what you have said. Please don't think me ungracious or unkind, Sydney. I want to do what is best. We can talk about it another time, can we not?"

"Any time you like."

And then he left her, and she lay still.

Had she been wrong all the while? Had she of her own free will allowed herself to drift into this state of languor, and weakness, and indifference to everything? What did these doctors know--what did Sydney himself know--of the great wave of disgust and shame and scorn that had pa.s.sed over her soul and submerged all that was good and fair? They could not understand: she said to herself pa.s.sionately that no man could understand the recoil of a woman's heart against sensual pa.s.sion and impurity. In her eyes Sydney had fallen as much as the woman whom he had betrayed, although she knew that the world would not say so; and in his degradation she felt herself included. She was dragged down to his level--_she_ was dragged through the mire: that was the thought that scorched her from time to time like a darting flame of fire. For Nan was very proud, although she looked so gentle, and she had never before come into contact with anything that could stain her whiteness of soul.

She had told Sydney that she loved him no longer, and in the deadness of emotion which had followed on the first acuteness of her grief for her lost idol, and the physical exhaustion caused by her late illness, she had thought she spoke the truth. But, after all, what was this yearning over him, in spite of all his errors, but love? what this continual thought of him, this aching sense of loss, even this intense desire that he should suffer for his sin, but an awakening within her of the deep, blind love that, as a woman has said, sometimes

"Stirreth deep below"

the ordinary love of common life, with a

"Hidden beating slow, And the blind yearning, and the long-drawn breath Of the love that conquers death"?

For the first time she was conscious of the existence of love that was beyond the region of spoken words, or caresses, or the presence of the beloved: love that intertwined itself with the fibres of her whole being, so that if it were smitten her very life was smitten too. This was the explanation of her weariness, her weakness, her distaste for everything: the best part of herself was gone when her love seemed to be destroyed. The invisible cords of love which bind a mother to her child are explicable on natural grounds; but not less strong, not less natural, though less common, are those which hold a nature like Nan's to the soul of the man she loves. That Sydney was unworthy of such a love, need not be said; but it is the office of the higher nature to seek out the unworthy and "to make the low nature better by its throes."

Nan lay still and looked her love in the face, and was startled to find that it was by no means dead, but stronger than it had been before. "And he is my husband," she said to herself; "I am bound to be true to him. I am ashamed to have faltered. What does it matter if he has erred? I may be bitterly sorry, but I will not love him one whit the less. I could never leave him now."

But a thought followed which was a pain to her. If she loved him in spite of error, what of her own sense of right and wrong? Was she not in danger of paltering with it in order to excuse him? would she not in time be tempted to say that he had not erred, that he had done only as other men do?--and so cloud the fair outlines of truth which had hitherto been mapped out with ethereal clearness for her by that conscience which she had always regarded, vaguely but earnestly, as in some sort the voice of G.o.d? Would she ever say that she herself had been an ignorant little fool in her judgment of men and men's temptations, and laugh at herself for her narrowness and the limitation of her view?

Would she come to renounce her high ideal, and content herself with what was merely expedient and comfortable and "like other people"? In that day, it seemed to Nan that she will be selling her own soul.

No, the way out of the present difficulty was not easy. She could tell Sydney that she loved him, but not that she thought him anything but wrong--wrong from beginning to end in the conduct of his past life. And would he be content with a love that condemned him? How easy it would be for her to love and forgive him if only he would give her one little sign by which to know that he himself was conscious of the blackness of that past! Repentance would show at least that there was no twist in his conscience, no flaw in his ethical const.i.tution; it would set him right with the universe, if not with himself. For the moment there was nothing Nan so pa.s.sionately desired as to hear him own himself in the wrong--not for any personal satisfaction so much as for his own sake; also that she might then put him upon a higher pedestal than ever, and worship him as a woman is always able to worship the man who has sinned and repented, rather than the man who has never fallen from his high estate; to rejoice over him as angels rejoice over the penitent more than over the just that need no repentance.

Sydney was a good deal startled when his wife said to him a few days later, in rather a timid way:

"Your sister has never been here. May I ask her to come and see me?"

"Certainly, if you wish it." He had not come to approve of Lettice's course of action, but he did not wish his disapproval to be patent to the world.

"I do wish it very much."

Sydney glanced at her quickly, but she did not look back at him. She only said:

"I have her address. I will ask her to come to-morrow afternoon."

"Very well."

So Nan wrote her note, and Lettice came.

As it happened, the two had never met. Lettice's preoccupation with her own affairs, Sydney's first resentment, now wearing off, and Nan's subsequent illness, had combined to prevent their forming any acquaintance. But the two women had no sooner clasped hands, and looked into each other's eyes, than they loved one another, and the sense of mental kinship made itself plain between them.

They sat down together on the couch in Nan's private sitting-room and fell into a little aimless talk, which was succeeded by a short, significant silence. Then Nan put out her hand and look Lettice's in her own.

"_You know!_" she said, in a whisper.

"I know--what?"

"You know all that is wrong between Sydney and myself. You know what made me ill."

"Yes."

"And you know too--that I love him--very dearly." The words were broken by a sob.

"Yes, dear--as he loves you."

"You think so--really?"

"I am quite sure of it. How could you doubt that?"

"I did doubt it for a time. I heard the man say that he married me because I was--rich."

"And you believed it?"

"I believed anything--everything. And the rest," said Nan, with a rising color in her face, "the rest was true."

"Dear," said Lettice, gently, "there is only one thing to be said now--that he would be very glad to undo the past. He is very sorry."

"You think he is?"

"Can you look at him and not see the marks of his sorrow and his pain upon his face? He has suffered a great deal; and it would be better for him now to forget the past, and to feel that you forgave him."

Nan brushed away some falling tears, but did not speak at once.

"Lettice," she said at last, in a broken whisper, "I believe I have been very hard and cold all these long months. I thought I did not care--but I do, I do. Only--I wish I could forget--that poor girl--and the little child----"

She burst into sudden weeping, so vehement that Lettice put both her arms round the slight, shaken figure, and tried to calm her by caresses and gentle words.

"Is there nothing that I could do? nothing Sydney could do--to make amends?"

"Nothing," said Lettice gently, but with decision. "They are happy now, and prosperous; good has come out of the evil, and it is better to forget the evil itself. Don't be afraid; I hear from them, and about them, constantly, and if ever they were in need of help, our hands would be the ones stretched out to help them. The good we cannot do to them we can do to others for their sakes."

And Nan was comforted.

Sydney came home early that evening; anxious, disquieted, somewhat out of heart. He found that Lettice had gone, and that Nan was in her sitting-room. He generally went up to her when he came in, and this time he did not fail; though his lips paled a little as he went upstairs, for the thought forced itself upon him that Lettice might have made things worse, not better, between himself and his wife.

The daylight was fading as he entered the room. Nan was lying down, but she was not asleep, for she turned her head towards him as he entered.