Punctually at ten o'clock on the 29th of October a brougham drove up to the gates of the prison in which Alan Walcott had spent his six months of retreat from the world; and almost immediately Alan made his appearance, leaning on the arm of a warder.

Lettice hurried to meet him, displacing the warder with a few words of thanks, and repressing with an effort the painful throbbing of her heart and throat. The sight of his shrunken form and hollow eyes, as he looked at her with pathetic and childlike trust, for a moment took away all her strength; but when his hand was laid upon her arm, and she accommodated her steps to his slow and unsteady movements, he found in her no trace of the weakness she had overcome.

It was clear that he had not yet made a good recovery from his fever. Lettice's last little qualm of doubt as to the use or need for what she had done disappeared as she saw this wreck of the man whom she loved—whom she believed to be innocent of offense and persecuted by an evil fate. What might have become of him if he had been left to crawl out of his prison into the cold and censorious world, without a friend, a hope, or an interest in life? What lowest depth of despair might he not have touched if in such a plight as this he should be found and tortured anew by his old enemy, whose cruelty was evidently not assuaged by the sufferings she had heaped upon him? Who now would say that he had no need of succor, that her service was unasked, unwarranted, unwomanly, that the duty of a pure and delicate soul was to leave him either to his own wife or to the tender mercies of strangers?

The carriage was piled with cushions and shawls, the day was bright and warm, Lettice was full of light gossip and cheerfulness, and Alan had reason to think that he had never had a more delightful drive.

"Where are you taking me?" he said, with a smile of restful gratitude, which clearly implied, "I do not care where it is, so long as I am taken by you!"

"You are going to a convalescent home, where you will be the only patient. If you obey the rules, you may get well in a month, and the first rule is that you are not to ask questions, or to think about unpleasant things."

"Are you my nurse?"

"That is the first breach of rules! They are very strict at this home, I can tell you!"

She spoke in a playful mood, but it left him with the impression that he was really being taken to a "home" of some kind, where he was to be nursed until he was well. He had no objection to make. He would have gone anywhere with equal pleasure, if he could be sure that she would be there to look after him. His one thought in prison, when he lay in the grip of fever, was that he must surely die before his sentence had run out. That was his hope and belief from day to day; and only when he heard that Lettice had come and made inquiries about him, and promised to fetch him as soon as he was released, did any real desire for life return to him. Now, in her presence, he was so completely happy that he forgot all his former sufferings and despair.

Weak as he was, he would have found words to tell her of his gratitude—and of much more than gratitude; but this because of, not in spite of, weakness—if she had not carefully checked him whenever he tried to speak. Fortunately, it was not at all hard to check him. He was infirm in mind as in body. Apart from the illness, which sapped his energies and paralyzed his power of thought, he had never thrown off the cloud of callous and despairing indifference which fell upon him after the fatal scene in Surrey Street. Add to this that the surrender of his independence to Lettice was in itself a pleasure to him, and we need not wonder that her self-imposed task seemed to her fairly easy of accomplishment.

At Bute Lodge they found everything very nice and comfortable. Mrs. Jermy and Mrs. Beadon (as Milly was to be called), who had come earlier in the morning with a cabful of yesterday's purchases, had carried out Lettice's instructions to the letter. The best room in the house looked out upon a delightful garden landscape—two borders, backed by well-grown box and bay-trees, holly, Irish yews, and clambering roses, with a lessening crowd of herbaceous plants in front, dwindling down to an edge of brilliant annuals on either side; and between these a long and level lawn, broken near the house by a lofty deodara, and ending in a bowling-green, and a thickly-planted bank of laurels, beyond which lay a far-off vista of drooping fruit-trees. The garden was reached through a small conservatory built outside a French window at one end of the room, and a low verandah ran along the remainder of the garden front.

Inside, all was as Lettice had planned it. A square writing table in front of the window was covered with a dozen of the books which had made most noise during the past season, with the November magazines, and the weekly papers which Alan had been wont to read. Milly had cut them all over night, and here they lay, with an easy-chair beside them, ready to tempt the student when he felt inclined and able to read. That was not just yet; but Alan saw the pile, and darted at his guardian angel another look of gratitude from his lustrous, melancholy eyes.

"Why, here," he said, looking round the room and out upon the garden, "a man must get well only too soon! I shall steadily refuse to mend."

"You will not be able to help yourself," said Lettice. "Now you are going to be left alone——"

"Not alone!"

"For half an-hour at the very least. All this floor belongs to you, and you are to have nothing to do with stairs. When you want anything you are to ring this bell, and Milly, whom you saw when we came in, will attend on you. Here, on this sideboard, are wine, and biscuits, and jelly, and grapes. Sit down and let me give you a glass of wine. We will have some lunch at one, tea at four, and dinner at seven—but you are to be eating grapes and jelly in between. The doctor will come and see you every morning."

"What doctor?"

"Why, the doctor of the Establishment, to be sure!"

"Oh, this is an Establishment?"

"Yes."

"It is more rational in its plan than some I have heard of, since it takes in your nurse and your nurse's maid. Will this precious doctor dine with us?"

"This precious! You are to have great faith in your doctor; but I am sorry to say he will not be able to dine with us. He has other occupations, you see; and for company I am afraid you will have to be content with such as your nurse may be disposed to give you!"

Before he could say anything else, she had left the room.

He was alone—alone and happy.

Straight from prison to paradise. That was what the morning's work meant for him, and he could not think with dry eyes of the peri who had brought him there.

Oh, the bitterness of that dungeon torture, when his heart had been branded with shame and seared with humiliation; when he had sworn that life had no more hope or savor for him, and the coming out from his cell had seemed, by anticipation, worse than the going in!

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 faggot 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, snatches 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 pass. 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 abasement, 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 passionate avowal of her love?

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 God."

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 ennobling 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 passed.

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.

"I thought you would write to me," Mrs. Hartley said, in her note. "I should hardly have forgiven you if you had not. There is some of your letter which I cannot understand, and some which I do not quite agree with. But come and explain it to me. I am an old woman, and have no time to be angry with those I love. Come on Thursday afternoon—alone—and we will have a good talk."

So Lettice went, and made her peace with her old friend, and was admitted to her favor again. But Alan was on probation still. The last thing which he would have expected, or indeed desired, was that he should be received and treated by his former acquaintance as though nothing had happened since he was a welcome guest in their houses. Especially as he and Lettice had not yet settled the question which all their friends were asking: "How would it end?"