“I believe you are right, Florine,” Molly answered, with sudden bitterness, and she resolved that she would not go among them again as long as she could help it. Florine fostered the resolve. She made Molly believe she was sicker than she was. She excluded every one from the room, declaring that her mistress was nervous and could not bear company. Even the Truehearts were, without Molly’s knowledge, denied admittance. Her craft had a different effect from what she intended. The report of Molly’s illness began to soften Cecil’s obdurate heart. His love, which had been smothered but not destroyed by the discovery of her falsity, began to burn again with its pristine warmth and ardor, augmented by sympathy with her illness, loneliness, and her delicate condition of health. He tried at first to beat down this reviving tenderness, this exquisite pity, and to keep up the old feud; but the memory of the past, when they had loved each other so well, pleaded now for the lonely, humbled, neglected wife. “How happy we were, and how quickly the time passed. I shall never be so happy again,” he said to himself, sadly, and there came over him, in the words of the poet, a yearning “To be friends; to be reconciled.” “I am foolish even to think of her,” he muttered, impatiently. “But she looks so sad, so ill--what if she should die?” That thought frightened him, and showed him first with what a passion he loved the frail creature who had deceived him. He went to his mother and asked her advice. “Is it not time for me to forgive that poor girl? What if she should die, mother?” he said. “She will not die. There is no such good luck,” Mrs. Laurens said, bitterly. “For shame, mother! I did not know you could be cruel enough to wish for any one’s death,” he exclaimed, and flung out of the room hurt and indignant. CHAPTER XXXVIII. He began to repent of that cruel letter he had written to Molly, and to think that it would not be impossible to forgive her for her treachery. He formed a wistful habit of watching the door behind which she had hidden herself from angry scrutiny, but it never opened save for the egress or ingress of Florine who regarded in such surprise the apparition of Monsieur Cecil in the hall, that he would color up to his temples and turn away. Yet the longing to see his wife, to hear her voice, grew upon Cecil daily, and much of his resentment died. Once or twice he was tempted to knock boldly at her door, to enter and take her in his arms, and tell her he forgave everything, because he loved her so well he could not live away from her presence. There was but one thing that deterred him; it was the sight every day in his room of the books Molly had sent back with that maddening message. The remembrance of that episode kept alive in his breast a tiny spark of resentment. “She should not have been so resentful, after all that she had done. She should have accepted the first overture I made toward peace,” he thought.