“Her whole heart was in her boy.  She often feared that she loved him too much—­more than God himself—­yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened.”

Still no better!  What is it all about?

I begin over again.

“Her whole heart was in her boy,” etc.  I go through this process ten times.  I should go through it twenty, or even thirty, for I am resolved to go on reading, but at the end of the tenth, my ear—­unconsciously strained—­catches the sound of a step at the stair-foot.  It is not the footman’s.  It is firmer, heavier, and yet quicker.

Eight weary months is it since I last heard that footfall.  My heart pulses with mad haste, my cheeks throb, but I sit still, and hold the book before my eyes.  I will not go to meet him.  I will be as indifferent as he!  When he opens the door, I will not even look round, I will be too much immersed in the page before me.

“Her whole heart was in her boy.  She often feared that—­”

The door-handle is turning.  I cannot help it!  Against my will, my head turns too.  With no volition of my own—­against my firmest intention—­my feet carry me hastily toward him.  My arms stretch themselves out.  Thank God! thank God! whatever happens afterward, I shall still thank God, and call him good for allowing it.  I am in Roger’s embrace.  No more mistakes! no more delays! he is here, and I am kissing him as I never kissed any one—­as I certainly never kissed him in my life before.

Well, I suppose that in every life there are some moments that are absolutely good—­that one could not mend even if one were given the power to try!  I suppose that even those who, looking back over their history, say, most distinctly and certainly, “It was a failure,” can yet lay the finger of memory on some such gold minutes—­it may be only half a dozen, only four, only two—­but still on some.

This is one of my gold moments, one of those misplaced ones that have strayed out of heaven, where, perhaps, they are all such—­perhaps—­ one can’t be sure, for what human imagination can grasp the idea of even a day, wholly made of such minutes?

I have forgotten Mrs. Huntley—­Mr. Musgrave.  Every ill suspicion, every stinging remembrance, is dead or fallen into a trance.  All bad thoughts have melted away from the earth.  Only joyful love and absolute faith remain, only the knowledge that Roger is mine, and I am his, and that we are in each other’s arms.  I do not know how long we remain without speaking.  I do not imagine that souls in bliss ever think of looking at the clock.  He is the first to break silence.  For the first time for eight months I hear his voice again—­the voice that for so many weeks seemed to me no better than any other voice—­whose tones I now feel I could pick out from those of any other living thing, did all creation shout together.