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The darkness spread to the bedroom that had been Lettice's and his: the curtained wardrobe was drawn, the bed lay smoothly sheeted with the quilt folded brightly at the foot, one of the many small glass lamps of the house stood filled upon the bureau. The iron safe was eclipsed, the pens upright in the glass of shot, the kitchen and spaces beyond.
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.
He liked the position of instructor and was not insensible to the flattery of Lettice's intentness on his answers. But he was a little dismayed by one of her questions, which showed the direction of her thoughts. "Did you hear anything about the women's college, Sydney?" For Girton and Newnham were less well known then than they are now. "Women's colleges! No, indeed.
The recrudescence of spring burned in his veins; but, at the same time, there was a new reluctance upon his flesh. The inanimate, obese mask of the priest, Lettice's sleeping countenance faintly stamped with pain, hovered in his consciousness. "It's different," he repeated. "You are losing your hold on pleasure," she observed critically aloof.
He would have hotly repudiated the insinuation that he was growing old; he would still, perhaps, have fought the man who said that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon Lettice's money was hastening it.
This review also stimulated the run upon her book, and carried it into a fourth edition. Lettice's fortune was made.
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?
Mr Bertrand was too dear and kind for it to be possible to make a charge of favouritism against him, but Lettice's striking likeness to her mother seemed to give her a special claim to his tenderness, while as for the rest of the household, Miss Briggs was as wax in Lettice's hands, for the simple reason that she was a solitary woman, and the girl showed her those little outward signs of affection which make up the sweetness of life; while the servants would do twice as much for her as for any other member of the family, because, "bless her pretty face, she had such a way with her!"
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. 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.
Although her tastes differed widely from those of Clara Graham, she found her friend's advice and assistance infinitely valuable to her; and many were the expeditions taken together to the Kensington shops to supply Lettice's requirements.
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