Bright dawned that day as I, with brighter brightness in my heart, climbed the stairs that led to my bedroom. But as I reached the door of it, I paused. There came a sound from the little closet beyond, where Jonah stretched his weary legs, and, as I hoped, had forgotten in harmless sleep the soul that he himself tormented worse than would the hell he feared. No, he did not rest. From his closet came low, fervent, earnest prayers. Listening a minute, half in scorn, half in pity, and in no unkindness, I heard him. "Praise be to God," he said, "Who maketh the crooked places straight, and openeth a path through the wilderness, and setteth in the hand of His servant a sword wherewith to smite the ungodly even in high places." What crooked places were made straight, what path opened, what sword set in Jonah's hand? Of the ungodly in high places there was no lack in the days of King Charles. But was Jonah Wall to smite them? I opened my door with a laugh. We were all mad that night, and my madness lasted till the morning. Yes, till the morning grew full my second dream was with me. CHAPTER IX OF GEMS AND PEBBLES How I sought her, how I found her, that fine house of hers with the lawn round it and the river by it, the stare of her lackeys, the pomp of her living, the great lord who was bowed out as I went in, the maid who bridled and glanced and laughed--they are all there in my memory, but blurred, confused, beyond clear recall. Yet all that she was, looked, said, aye, or left the clearer for being unsaid, is graven on my memory in lines that no years obliterate and no change of mind makes hard to read. She wore the great diamond necklace whose purchase was a fresh text with the serious, and a new jest for the wits; on her neck it gleamed and flashed as brilliantly and variously as the dazzling turns in her talk and the unending chase of fleeting moods across her face. Yet I started from my lodging, sworn to win her, and came home sworn to have done with her. Let me tell it; I told it to myself a thousand times in the days that followed. But even now, and for all the times that the scene has played itself again before my unwilling eyes, I can scarcely tell whence and how at the last, the change came. I think that the pomp itself, the lord and the lackeys, the fine house, and all her state struck as it were cold at my heart, dooming to failure the mad appeal which they could not smother. But there was more; for all these might have been, and yet not reached or infected her soul. But when I spoke to her in words that had for me a sweetness so potent as to win me from all hesitation and make as nothing the whole world beside, she did not understand. I saw that she tried to understand; when she failed, I had failed also. The flower was dead; what use then to cherish or to water it? I had not thought it was dead, but had prayed that, faded and choked though it were, yet it might find life in the sunshine of my love and the water of her tears.