“Yes, truer to me than you think--and truer to yourself. It was I you loved--I! There have been times when I thought I must give that up, but now I know I need not. It was I. Sometime, perhaps,--sometime,--not now”-- Her voice broke, she did not finish, the end was a sob. Their eyes rested upon each other a few seconds, and then he released her hand and went away. He was absent for two years, and during that time his friends heard much good of him. He lived the life of a recluse and a hard worker. He learned to know his own strength, and taught the world to recognize it also. At the end of the second year, being in Paris, he went one night to the _Nouvelle Opéra_. Toward the close of the second act he became conscious of a little excited stir among those surrounding him. Every glass seemed directed toward a new arrival who stood erect and cool in one of the stage-boxes. She might have been Cleopatra. Her costume was of a creamy satin, she was covered with jewels, and she stood up confronting the house, as it regarded her, with _sang froid_. Lennox rose hurriedly and left the place. He was glad to breathe the bitterly cold but pure night air. She had made no idle prophecy. He had seen her again! There hung upon the wall of his private room a picture whose completion had been the first work after his landing. He went in to it and looked at it with something like adoration. “'Sometime'” he said, “perhaps now,” and the next week he was on his way home. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lodusky, by Frances Hodgson Burnett