For as November and December passed away the relation between the husband and wife steadily settled and improved. "We shall rub along," George said to himself in his frank, secret thoughts--"in the end it will be much better perhaps than either of us could have hoped." That no doubt was the utmost that could ever be said; but it was much. The night after his mother's death, Letty abruptly, violently even, as though worked up to it by an inner excitement, told him the story of her wrestle with Marcella. Then, throwing some letters into his hand she broke into sobbing and ran away from him. When he went to look for her his own eyes were wet. "Who else could have done such a thing?" he said; and Letty made no protest. The letters gave him food for thought for many a day afterwards. They were little less of a revelation to him than the motives and personality lying behind them had been to Letty. In spite of all that he had felt for the woman who had written them, they still roused in him a secret and abiding astonishment. We use the words "spiritual," "poetic" in relation to human conduct; we talk as though all that the words meant were familiarly understood by us; and yet when the spiritual or the poetic comes actually to walk among us, slips into the forms and functions of our common life, we find it amazing, almost inhuman. It gives us some trouble to take it simply, to believe in it simply. Yet nothing in truth could be a more inevitable outcome of character and circumstance than these letters of Marcella Maxwell to George Tressady's wife. Marcella had suffered under a strong natural remorse, and to free her heart from the load of it she had thrown herself into an effort of reconciliation and atonement with all the passion, the subtlety, and the resource of her temperament. She had now been wooing Letty Tressady for weeks, nor had the eager contriving ability she had been giving to the process missed its reward. Letty fresh from the new impressions made upon her by Marcella at home, and Marcella as a wife, by a beauty she could no longer hate, and a charm to which she had been forced to yield, had found herself amid the loneliness and dulness of Perth gradually enveloped and possessed anew by the same influence, acting in ways that grew week by week more personal, and more subduing.