It was about this time that my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley, my mother's brother, who had quarrelled with her, became reconciled to her, and came to Raxton. He at once recommended that a friend of his, a famous London surgeon, should he consulted about my lameness. I accordingly went with him to London to be placed under the treatment of the eminent man. Had this been done earlier, what a world of suffering might have been spared me! The man of science pronounced my ailment to be quite curable. He performed an operation upon the leg, and after a long and careful course of treatment in town, advised that I should go to Margate for a long stay, and avail myself of that change of air. I went, accompanied by my mother and brother, and stayed there several months. My father used to come to see us once a month or so, stay for a week, and then go back. I now wrote another letter to Winifred, and after a long delay, got a reply, but it consisted mainly of descriptions of the way in which she paddled in the Welsh brooks and of lessons in the shawl-dance which she was taking from Shuri Lovell, the mother of her Gypsy friend. So vividly did she describe these lessons that her pictures haunted me. I wrote in reply to this a letter burning with my ever-growing love, but to this I got no reply. As the surgeon had prophesied, I made such advance that I was after a while able to walk with tolerable ease without my crutches, by the aid of a walking-stick; and as time went on, the tonic effect of Margate air, aiding the remedies prescribed by the surgeon, worked such a change in me that I was pronounced well, and the doctor said I might return home. I returned to Raxton a cripple no longer. I returned cured. I say. But how entangled is this web of our life! How almost impossible is it that good should come unmixed with evil, or evil unmixed with good! At Margate, where the bracing air did more, I doubt not, towards my restoration to health than all the medicines,--at Margate my brother drank in his death-poison. During the very last days of our stay he caught scarlet fever. In a fortnight he was dead. The shock to me was very severe. It laid my mother prostrate for months. I was now by the death of Frank the representative of our branch of the family, and a little fellow of uncomfortable importance. My uncle Aylwin of Alvanley. being childless, was certain to leave me his large estates, for he had dropped entirely away from the Aylwins of Rington Manor, and also from the branch of the Aylwin family represented by my kinsman Cyril. II THE MOONLIGHT CROSS OF THE GNOSTICS I My mother had some prejudice against a public school, and I was sent to a large and important private one at Cambridge. And go, with Winifred on my mind, I went one damp winter's morning to Dullingham, our nearest railway station, on my way to Cambridge.