Each morning during his visit a letter from Alice awaited him on the breakfast-table. For a week or two the chant was timorous, uncertain; of a pitch to soothe his self-complacency, to stir no ruffle in his holiday mood. But towards the end of his time she found herself--she tuned up, and adventured. And then followed Wyndham's awakening; taking him with the force of cataclysm, and dashing him out of his drowsy mood of contentment. Evidently the poor child was not living in this world. If her feet touched earth, her head at any rate was in a heaven of its own. She poured herself out with a lyric fervour that was like the song of a lark for rapture. All the years of her life she had saved herself for this, not frittered her emotions away in flirtations or frivolous love-affairs--as the soberer Wyndham now reflected. Her ideals were as unsullied as in her childhood. Her spirit soared up with a tremulous eager joy--without doubts, without cynicism, with a simple sure faith in love's paradise. Reserved, shrinking away from men, her heart yet held rich store of treasure, and she poured all out at his feet. Timorousness had vanished; the soul that had woven its own music in solitude had been translated to a higher universe. There were no barriers now, nothing but this joyous, confident life into which her womanhood had passed at that moment when, swept onward by the flood, she had thrown her arms around him. "Dearest," she wrote, "my whole past life seems like a half-slumber from which I have awakened into a world almost too dazzling with light and joy. Yet who am I that this joy should have come to me? When I think of the years when I lived alone with my own thoughts, it seems wonderful that your love should have been granted to me. The world is full of pale ghosts that come and go, not knowing what life is, and it amuses me to wonder if any of them will ever turn into real people. "Oh, my dear love, you are so far, far off. I want you here, here again with me, happy that you love me, happy that I love you, wanting no other life than this with your arms round me and your heart beating close to me. And yet I like to think that you are happy amid your own family, in the place where your childhood was spent. I love, dear, to dwell on the thought of your childhood, and fancy I see you now, a beautiful child in velvet, with a feather in your hat and a toy sword. And I see myself a child again, playing with this fairy little prince in the meadows. How beautiful if we were children like that! Impossible does it seem? Yet is anything impossible in this enchanted world? "Think of me, dearest, with the deepest and truest love of your heart, as I am thinking of you every moment of this wonderful life."