There was a pause, in which it was evident to Kitty that Lucia was thinking deeply, and beautifully too.

“Have I made him suffer?  I’m afraid I did once.  He was valuable, and I damaged him.”

“Yes; and ever since you’ve been trying to put him together again; in your own way, not his.  That’s fatal.”

Lucia shook her head and followed her own train of thought.  “Kitty, to be perfectly honest, I think—­I’m not sure, but I think—­from something he said to-day that you were right about him once.  I mean about his beginning to care too much.  I’m afraid it was so, at Harmouth, towards the end.  But it isn’t so any more.  He tried to tell me just now.  He did it beautifully; as if he knew that that would make me happier.  At least I think that’s what he meant.  He didn’t say much, but I’m sure he was thinking about his marriage.”

“Heaven help his wife then—­if he got as far as that.  I suppose you take a beautiful view of her, too?  Drop it, for goodness’ sake, drop it.”

“Not I. It would mean dropping him.  It’s all right, Kitty.  You don’t know the ways of poets.”

“Perhaps not.  But I know the ways of men.”

Though Kitty had not accomplished her mission she so far prevailed that she carried her Lucy off to dinner.

It was somewhere towards midnight, when all the house was quiet, that Lucia first looked into Keith Rickman’s sonnets.  She had been led to expect something in the nature of a personal revelation, and the first sonnet struck the key-note, gave her the clue.

    I asked the minist’ring priests who never tire
      In love’s high service, who behold their bliss
      Through golden gloom of Love’s dread mysteries,
    What heaven there be for earth’s foregone desire?

    And they kept silence.  But the gentle choir
      Who sing Love’s praises answered me, “There is
      No voice to speak of these deep sanctities,
    For Love hath sealed his servants’ lips with fire.”

    Yet in his faithfulness put thou thy faith,
      Though he hath bound thee in the house of pain,
        And given thy body to the scourging years,
        And brought thee for thy thirst the drink of tears,
    That sorrowing thou shouldst serve him unto death;
      For when Love reigneth, all his saints shall reign.

She kindled and flamed, her whole being one inspired and burning sympathy.  She knew what it was all about.  She was on the track of a Poet’s Progress in quest of the beloved Perfection, Beauty and Truth in one.  Of those nine and twenty sonnets she looked for a score that should make immortal the moments of triumph and of vision, the moments of rapture and fulfilment of the heart’s desire.  Her glance fell now on two lines that clearly pointed to the goal of those who travel on the divine way—­

    —­Elysian calm and passion with no stain
        Of mortal tears, no touch of mortal pain—­