’"Achille, beloved! my eyes are dim—­the mists of death are gathering.  O Achille! the white cottage by the river—­the nest in the reeds—­your face and mine in the water—­the blue heaven below us in the stream—­O joy, quick! those hands, those lips!  But listen, listen! it is the cruel wind rising, rising:  it chills me to the bone, it chokes, it stifles me!  I cannot see the river, and the cottage is gone, and the sun.  O Achille, it is dark, so dark!  Gather me close, beloved!—­closer, closer!  O death is kind—­tender, like your touch!  I have no fears—­none!"

’She sank back into her chair.  Anything more pathetic, more noble than her intonation of those words, could not have been imagined.  Desforets herself could not have spoken them with a more simple, a more piercing tenderness.  I was so confused by a multitude of conflicting feelings—­my own impressions and yours, the realities of the present position and the possibilities of her future—­that I forgot to applaud her.  It was the first time I had had any glimpse at all of her dramatic power, and, rough and imperfect as the test was, it seemed to me enough.  I have not been so devoted to the Francais, and to some of the people connected with it, for ten years, for nothing!  One gets a kind of insight from long habit which, I think, one may trust.  Oh, you blind Eustace, how could you forget that for a creature so full of primitive energy, so rich in the stuff of life, nothing is irreparable!  Education has passed her by.  Well, she will go to find her education.  She will make a teacher out of every friend, out of every sensation.  Incident and feeling, praise and dispraise, will all alike tend to mould the sensitive plastic material into shape.  So far she may have remained outside her art; the art, no doubt, has been a conventional appendage, and little more.  Training would have given her good conventions, whereas she has only picked up bad and imperfect ones.  But no training could have given her what she will evidently soon develop for herself, that force and flame of imagination which fuses together instrument and idea in one great artistic whole.  She has that imagination.  You can see it in her responsive ways, her quick sensitive emotion.  Only let it be roused and guided to a certain height, and it will overleap the barriers which have hemmed it in, and pour itself into the channels made ready for it by her art.

’There, at least, you have my strong impression.  It is, in many ways, at variance with some of my most cherished principles; for both you and I are perhaps inclined to overrate the value of education, whether technical or general, in its effect on the individuality.  And, of course, a better technical preparation would have saved Isabel Bretherton an immense amount of time; would have prevented her from contracting a host of bad habits—­all of which she will have to unlearn.  But the root of the matter is in her; of that I am sure; and whatever weight of hostile circumstance may be against her, she will, if she keeps her health—­as to which I am sometimes, like you, a little anxious—­break through it all and triumph.