There followed a silence. Nothing could be said to this, and the two men of the law munched their biscuits and drank their wine hastily, conscious of a sudden excitement stirring in them,—a strange impulse, moving them both to the desire of thrashing Lord Carlyon, which would be an action totally inconsistent with legal custom and procedure. But the sight of the fair, grave, patient woman who had worked so hard, who held such a high position of fame, and who was so grievously wronged in her private life, had a powerful effect upon even the practical and prosaic disposition of the two men born to considerations of red tape and wordy documents; and when they took their leave of her it was with a profound deference and sympathy which she did not fail to notice. Another time their evident interest and kindliness would have moved her, but now she was so strung up with feverish excitement and eagerness to finish the work she had begun, that external things made very little impression upon her. She returned to her writing with renewed zest; Spartan was her chief companion; and only her maid Emily began to notice how ill she was looking. She had intended to consult a doctor about her health; but, absorbed in her work, she put it off from day to day, promising herself that she would do so when her book was finished. She received no news whatever from her husband; he was trying the effect of a lengthy absence and sustained silence on her always sensitive mind. And so the days went on, through all bright June and the warm beginning of July, till one morning she entered her room prepared to write the last portion of what she instinctively felt and knew would lift her higher among the cold pinnacles of fame than she had ever been. She was aware of a soft lassitude upon her,—a sense of languor that was more delightful than unpleasing; the beautiful repose that distinguishes a studious and deeply-thinking mind, which had been hers in a very great degree before her marriage, when, as single-hearted Delicia Vaughan, she had astonished the world by her genius, came back to her now, and the clouds of trouble and perplexity seemed suddenly to clear and leave her life as blank and calm and pure as though the shadow of a false love had never darkened it. The sun fell warmly across her desk, flickering over the pens and paper; and Spartan stretched himself full length in his usual place in the window-nook with a deep sigh of absolute content. And with radiance in her eyes and a smile on her lips, Delicia sat down and wrote her ‘conclusion.’ Her brain had never been clearer,—thoughts came quickly, and with the thoughts were evoked new and felicitous modes of expression, which wrote themselves, as it were, without an effort on her own part.