With this thought in her mind, the weary child sank to sleep, and dreamed of being in “Lady’s” garden of delight, among the glorious flowers, or down the gooseberry walk, or beside the coop where the bantam “chickies” ran in and out, with Ducky Darling cooing to them. So passed the hours of that April night. CHAPTER XXI WILL HARCOURT’S ADVENTURE When Will Harcourt had answered Roma Fronde’s confiding and affectionate note by a letter of vague confession and final renunciation, he looked upon his own life as “done and finished,” so far as any hope in the future was concerned. What had he to live for? Roma, his adored, his ideal woman, his muse, his goddess, was lost to him forever! was worse than lost, for she was repulsed, repudiated, and by himself. His youthful ambition was gone forever; was worse than gone, for it was turned to humiliation, and by his own act. Oh, misery! Oh, misery! What had he to live for, indeed? What? For one bitter end! To expiate his sin! To toil hard at the roughest sort of work, among honest laborers, with whom he did not feel good enough to associate, to look forward to nothing better than the coming of that bitter day which should deprive him of his only friend in the death of his aged mother, and leave him free to deliver his conscience of his guilty secret, nay, constrain him to denounce himself as a criminal, to give himself up to justice, to be dealt with according to law, to suffer—what penalty? Imprisonment, with penal servitude, for the term of his natural life, must be the lightest doom that could be meted out to him, as the measure of his great offense. For the term of his natural life. And he was but twenty-four years old! A half century of imprisonment and penal slavery. Well, let it come, he thought, not defiantly, indeed, but humbly. He had deserved it all. And, long as it might last, it would end some time. And there was an after life, where faith, repentance and reformation in this world would surely be followed by rest, peace and joy in that world to come, where, also, as some believed, true lovers severed here would meet to part no more forever, because from their creation their souls had been essentially one, though apparently two. And, if this should be true, as some deep inspiration whispered that it surely was—man might bear patiently, hopefully, courageously all that the world, the flesh and the devil might inflict upon him even the hardest of all to bear the disgrace and penalty of his own sin and folly. In this mood of mind Harcourt reached New York late one evening toward the last of April. He went directly to his lodgings, passed up the four flights of stairs to the attic floor, and paused a moment in the passage before his own and his neighbor’s door.