And thus we leave this helpless pair, like the rest, to themselves for a year; Herbert to get better as he could, Reine to fight her battle out, and win it so far, and recover the calm of use and wont. Eventually the sky widened to her, and the hills drew farther off, and the oppression loosened from her heart. She took Herbert to Italy in October, still mending; and wrote long and frequent letters about him to Whiteladies, boasting of his walks and increasing strength, and promising that next Summer he should go home. I don’t want the reader to think that Reine had altogether lost her heart during this brief episode. It came back to her after awhile, having been only vagrant, errant, as young hearts will be by times. She had but learned to know, for the first time in her life, what a difference happens in this world according to the presence or absence of one being; how such a one can fill up the space and pervade the atmosphere; and how, suddenly going, he seems to carry everything away with him. Her battle and struggle and pain were half owing to the shame and distress with which she found out that a man could do this, and had done it, though only for a few days, to herself; leaving her in a kind of blank despair when he was gone. But she got rid of this feeling (or thought she did), and the world settled back into its right proportions, and she said to herself that she was again her own mistress. Yet there were moments when the stars were shining, when the twilight was falling, when the moon was up--or sometimes in the very heat of the day, when a sensible young woman has no right to give way to folly--when Reine all at once would feel not her own mistress, and the world again would all melt away to make room for one shadow. As the Winter passed, however, she got the better of this sensation daily, she was glad to think. To be sure there was no reason why she should not think of Everard if she liked; but her main duty was to take care of Herbert, and to feel, once more, if she could, as she had once felt, and as she still professed to feel, poor child, in her prayers, that if Herbert only lived she would ask for nothing more. CHAPTER XXII.