Miss Lanyon lived at Woodlands, where sometimes Ella and sometimes Dorothy stayed with her; and now and then for change of scene went Sylvester. He could not realise the old man's dream, and live there, devoting himself to research, but it comforted him to know that the house had not passed into alien hands. His own home in Weymouth Street was gladdened by a child's presence, and the spirit of its desolation departed. Instinctively he felt that it was too gloomy for a child, and with the pathetic helplessness of an inartistic man who had never concerned himself about such things, he took her with him to choose new wall papers, curtains, and rugs. Perhaps the result was incongruous, but at any rate it was bright, and pleased the choosers mightily. The effect of the great revolution in Sylvester's attitude to life gradually grew more apparent. The intense humanity of his profession won to his heart now that the barriers of ice were melted. The intellectual problem which it had been his duty to solve became the hurt to a suffering creature which it was his privilege to heal. A new tenderness softened his nature. The gift of speech came to him as by the miracle of the gift of tongues. To his great wonder, the society of ordinary kindly men and women, from which in a general way he had shrunk all his life through shyness and reserve, and which in positive misanthropy he had afterwards shunned, gradually appeared to him a sweet and pleasant thing, until he recognised it as a necessity in his existence. And old feelings, sweeter, sadder, infinitely deeper than of old, were reawakened. How it came about he knew not. When he had parted from Ella after his father's funeral, he did not love her. He had realised the irrevocable loss of a happiness that might have been, and that was all. Then on her return from the south of France late in the spring he had seen her and spoken with her, and she had been kind. A month afterwards he had seen her again, and once more six months after that,--for they rarely met. And then he knew that she was the one woman in the world for him, and that the love for which he had kissed her years ago was as moonlight unto the sunlight of his present love. Once more they had met, and he told her. “How can I love you when you have done so much to hurt me?” she said. “I don't ask for your love,” he urged. “You do,” she replied with a smile of wisdom. “Don't deceive yourself, Syl.” “Well, then, I will make you love me.” “Don't speak like that,” she said with a shiver. “It is horrible to make a woman love. There is no woman made to love that does not repent it in shame and misery.” “But you once did love me.”