She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully worked out a difficult puzzle.  But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

“Oh, my God!  I sent him to Ned—­I told him where to go!  I sent him to this room!” she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her.  But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying.  Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward,” it said.  “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”

THE LETTERS

I

UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed in the cold spring sunshine.  As she breasted the incline, she noticed the first waves of wistaria over courtyard railings and the high lights of new foliage against the walls of ivy-matted gardens; and she thought again, as she had thought a hundred times before, that she had never seen so beautiful a spring.

She was on her way to the Deerings’ house, in a street near the hilltop; and every step was dear and familiar to her.  She went there five times a week to teach little Juliet Deering, the daughter of Mr. Vincent Deering, the distinguished American artist.  Juliet had been her pupil for two years, and day after day, during that time, Lizzie West had mounted the hill in all weathers; sometimes with her umbrella bent against a driving rain, sometimes with her frail cotton parasol unfurled beneath a fiery sun, sometimes with the snow soaking through her patched boots or a bitter wind piercing her thin jacket, sometimes with the dust whirling about her and bleaching the flowers of the poor little hat that had to “carry her through” till next summer.

At first the ascent had seemed tedious enough, as dull as the trudge to her other lessons.  Lizzie was not a heaven-sent teacher; she had no born zeal for her calling, and though she dealt kindlyand dutifully with her pupils, she did not fly to them on winged feet.  But one day something had happened to change the face of life, and since then the climb to the Deering house had seemed like a dream-flight up a heavenly stairway.

Her heart beat faster as she remembered it—­no longer in a tumult of fright and self-reproach, but softly, peacefully, as ifbrooding over a possession that none could take from her.