* * * * *

“I trust I am not late.  Your clocks, I think, are ahead of ours.  You said eleven?”

Aldous advanced into the room with hand outstretched.  He had been ushered into the drawing-room, somewhat to his surprise.

Marcella came forward.  She was in black as before, and pale, but there was a knot of pink anemones fastened at her throat, which, in the play they made with her face and hair, gave him a start of pleasure.

“I wanted,” she said, “to ask you again about those shares—­how to manage the sale of them.  Could you—­could you give me the name of some one in the City you trust?”

He was conscious of some astonishment.

“Certainly,” he said.  “If you would rather not entrust it to Mr. French, I can give you the name of the firm my grandfather and I have always employed; or I could manage it for you if you would allow me.  You have quite decided?”

“Yes,” she said mechanically,—­“quite.  And—­and I think I could do it myself.  Would you mind writing the address for me, and will you read what I have written there?”

She pointed to the little writing-table and the writing materials upon it, then turned away to the window.  He looked at her an instant with uneasy amazement.

He walked up to the table, put down his hat and gloves beside it, and stooped to read what was written.

"It was in this room you told me I had done you a great wrong.  But wrongdoers may be pardoned sometimes, if they ask it.  Let me know by a sign, a look, if I may ask it.  If not it would be kind to go away without a word."

She heard a cry.  But she did not look up.  She only knew that he had crossed the room, that his arms were round her, her head upon his breast.

“Marcella!—­wife!” was all he said, and that in a voice so low, so choked, that she could hardly hear it.

He held her so for a minute or more, she weeping, his own eyes dim with tears, her cheek laid against the stormy beating of his heart.

At last he raised her face, so that he could see it.

“So this—­this was what you had in your mind towards me, while I have been despairing—­fighting with myself, walking in darkness.  Oh, my darling! explain it.  How can it be?  Am I real?  Is this face—­these lips real?”—­he kissed both, trembling.  “Oh! when a man is raised thus—­in a moment—­from torture and hunger to full joy, there are no words—­”

His head sank on hers, and there was silence again, while he wrestled with himself.

At last she looked up, smiling.

“You are to please come over here,” she said, and leading him by the hand, she took him to the other side of the room.  “That is the chair you sat in that morning.  Sit down!”

He sat down, wondering, and before he could guess what she was going to do she had sunk on her knees beside him.

“I am going to tell you,” she said, “a hundred things I never told you before.  You are to hear me confess; you are to give me penance; you are to say the hardest things possible to me.  If you don’t I shall distrust you.”