‘Stop a bit,’ she said, ‘let me finish. I want to be brutally plain-spoken--it’s really best to be so. I want you to know me as I am. I have loved Lucian Damerel ever since he and I were boy and girl. It is, perhaps, a curious love--you might say that there is very much more of a mother’s, or a sister’s, love in it than a wife’s. Well, I don’t know. I do know that it nearly broke my heart when I heard of his marriage to Haidee. I cannot tell--I have never been able to tell--in what exact way it was that I wanted him, but I did not want her to have him. Perhaps all that, or most of that, feeling has gone. I have tried hard, by working for others, to put all thought of another woman’s husband out of my mind. But the thought of Lucian is still there--it may, perhaps, always be there. While it is--even in the least, the very least degree--you understand, do you not?’ she said, with a sudden note of eager appeal breaking into her voice. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I understand.’ She rose to her feet and held out her hand to him. ‘Then don’t let us try to put into words what we can feel much better,’ she said, smiling. ‘We are friends--always. And you are going away.’ The children found out that for some time at any rate there would be no more visits from the Lord. But the toys and the books, the fruit and flowers, came as regularly as ever, and the Lord was not forgotten. CHAPTER XVIII During the greater part of that summer Lucian had been working steadily on two things: the tragedy which Mr. Harcourt was to produce at the Athenæum in December, and a new poem which Mr. Robertson intended to publish about the middle of the autumn season. Lucian was flying at high game in respect of both. The tragedy was intended to introduce something of the spirit and dignity of Greek art to the nineteenth-century stage--there was to be nothing common or mean in connection with its production; it was to be a gorgeous spectacle, but one of high distinction, and Lucian’s direct intention in writing it was to set English dramatic art on an elevation to which it had never yet been lifted. The poem was an equally ambitious attempt to revive the epic; its subject, the Norman Conquest, had filled Lucian’s mind since boyhood, and from his tenth year onwards he had read every book and document procurable which treated of that fascinating period. He had begun the work during his Oxford days; the greater part of it was now in type, and Mr. Robertson was incurring vast expense in the shape of author’s corrections. Lucian polished and rewrote in a fashion that was exasperating; his publisher, never suspecting that so many alterations would be made, had said nothing about them in drawing up a formal agreement, and he was daily obliged to witness a disappearance of profits.