What had made her first ask Marcella for it, and then place it on her table where George might, nay, must see it? Some vague wish, no doubt, to "make up"; to punish herself, while touching him. But the recollection of him, bending over the picture, tortured her, gripped her at the heart for many a day afterwards. She let it be seen no more. Yet that week she wrote more fully, more incoherently, more piteously to Marcella than ever before. She talked, not without bitterness and injustice, of her bringing up, asked what she should read, spread out her puzzles with the poor, or with her household--half angrily, as though she were accusing someone. For the first time, as it were, she was seeking a teacher in the art of living. And though the tone was still querulous, she knew, and Marcella presently dared to guess, that the ugly house on the hill had in truth ceased to be in the least dull or burdensome to her. George went in and out of it. And for the woman that has come to hunger for her husband's step, there is no more ennui. * * * * * Letty indeed hardly knew the strength of her own position. The reading of Lady Maxwell's letters to his wife had cleared a number of relics and fragments from George's mind. The day of passion was done. Yes!--but to see her frequently, to be brought back into any of the old social or political relations to her and Maxwell, from this his pride shrank no less than his conscience. Yet there was a large party in his constituency, and belonging to it some of the men whose probity and intelligence he had come to rate most highly, who were pressing him hard not to resign in February, and, indeed, not to resign at all. The few public meetings he had so far addressed had been stormy indeed, but on the whole decidedly friendly to him, and it was urged that he must at least present himself for re-election, in which case his expenses should be borne, and he should be left as unpledged as possible. Since the passage of the Bill Fontenoy's reactionary movement had lost ground largely in the constituency; and the position of independent member with a general leaning to the Government was no doubt easily open to George Tressady. But his whole soul shrank from such a renewal of the effort of politics--probably because of that something in him, that enfeebling, paralysing something, which in all directions made him really prefer the half to the whole, and see barriers in the way of all enthusiasms. Nevertheless, the arguments he had to meet, and the kind persuasions he had to rebut, made these weeks all the more trying to him.