‘I am ready to believe that she was beautiful,’ said Lucius, with a tender smile. Lucille’s story had brought them ever so much nearer together. Now, indeed, he might allow himself to be interested in her—might freely surrender himself captive to the charm of her gentle beauty—the magic of her sympathetic voice. That little pathetic picture of her sorrowful childhood—a tender heart overflowing with love that none cared to garner—_that_ made him her slave for ever. Was this love at first sight, that foolish unreasoning passion, which in Geoffrey Hossack he deemed akin to lunacy? No, rather an intuitive recognition of the one woman in all the world created to be the sharer of his brightest hopes, the object of his sweetest solicitude, the recompense and crown of his life. He had to tear himself away after only a few friendly words, for Duty, speaking with the voice of his parish patients, seemed to call him from this enchanted scene. ‘I shall look in once or twice a week, in the evening,’ he said, ‘and keep a watchful eye upon my patient. Good-bye.’ Towards the end of that week he spent another evening at Cedar House, and in the following week two more evenings and so on, through windy March, and in the lengthening days of April, until he looked back and wondered how he had managed to live before his commonplace existence had been brightened by these glimpses of a fairer world. The old man grew still more familiar—friendly even—and allowed the two young people to talk at their ease; nor did he seem to have any objection to their growing intimacy. As the days grew longer, he suffered them to wander about the old house in the spring twilight, and out into a desert in the rear, which had once been a garden, where there still remained an ancient cedar, with skeleton limbs that took grim shapes in the dusk. Not a second Eden, by any means, for this blossomless garden ended in a creek, where grimy barges, laden with rubble or sand, or rags, or bones, or coal, or old iron, lay lopsided in the inky mud, against the mouldering woodwork of a dilapidated wharf, waiting to be disburdened of their freight. Yet to one at least these wanderings, these lingering _tête-à-têtes_ by the creek, looking down dreamily at the Betsy Jane of Wapping, or the Ann Smith of Bermondsey, were all-sufficient for happiness.