Now in the darkest day of the year, spring held out its promise to the woods--and to him. The yellow of a hidden sunrise was filling the clouds like hope unbounded--and Nigel's dream came back to him, his dream of marble halls and of love that was "still the same." He saw himself playing to thronged audiences, with Tony close to him, unseen, intangible, but there--with all the sweet memories of Lingfield and Brambletye revived and re-established, her friendship, candour, and tenderness "still the same." Then he understood. Gulfs unbridgeable might lie between the convict with his stained and broken life and the simple little schoolgirl of Shovelstrode. But the well-known violinist who played for "big salaries," who "filled the Albert Hall."... A terrible thing had happened to Nigel--he had begun to hope. When hope has been a long time away, the return of it is like the return of sensation to a frost-bitten limb. It pricks, it burns, it tortures. It tortured Nigel till a cry of anguish burst from him, bitterer than in any of his fits of despair. He bent forward, clapping his hand to his side. Hope showed him the doors of his prison flung wide at last. For long years he had never dreamed of escape, he was a captive, so fast in prison that he could not get forth--free only among the dead. But now the doors were open and he could go out. His music would raise him up out of the pit, bring him back to an earth washed in rain and spring, to touch the trembling innocence of the lilies, and drink the sweetness of the eternal May. "Oh, God! Oh, God!--I want to be free! I want to be free!" The cry was not a prayer so much as the cry of his great hunger, finding voice at last--"I want to be free! I want to be free!" His mind dropped hastily to practical details. He had seen von Gleichroeder's address on his card, and that tough memory of his, which was sometimes a curse to him, held it fast. He would write and tell him he had changed his mind. It would be humiliating, but it must be done. Then he would go to London, and work--and work. It was not only the topmost pinnacle that could lift him out of his old life, the name he would make for himself need not be a great name--as long as it was a fair name. That was what he wanted, and would struggle for--a fair name. Hard work, an honest livelihood, self-denial, constant communion with the beautiful and inspired, would purge his soul of its defilement. The hideous stain of his crime would be wiped off. When he had lived for years in poverty and honesty, when he had brought by his music a little sunshine into poor lives like those he had smitten, when the fields of three counties had ceased to reproach him for his treachery, and the name of Furlonger had some faint lustre from his bearing it--then he would be free. And when he was free he would allow himself--not to claim Tony's friendship or anything else beyond him, but just to think of her--think of her with hope.