if her accusation remained unspoken, he would know it, he would see it, through whatever web her tenderness wrapped round it.  His genius would contend against her judgement, would not yield a point to her opinion, but his honour would take it as settling the question of publication.  In no case should she be able to say or think that he had used his genius as a cover for a cowardly passion, or that by compelling her admiration he had taken advantage of her pride.

But would she say it or think it?  Not she.  He knew her.  And if his knowledge had brought much misery, it brought consolation too.  Where Lucia was concerned he had never been sustained by any personal conceit; he had never walked vainly in the illusion of her love.  At that supreme point his imagination had utterly broken down; he had never won from it a moment’s respite from his intolerable lucidity.  There was a certain dignity about his despair, in that of all the wonderful web of his dreams he had made no fine cloak to cover it.  It shivered and suffered in a noble nakedness, absolutely unashamed.  But one thing he knew also, that if Lucia did not love him, she loved his genius.  Even when lucidity made suffering unendurable, he had still the assurance that his genius would never suffer at her hands.  For did she not know that God gives the heart of a poet to be as fuel to his genius, for ever consumed and inconsumable?  That of all his passions his love is the nearest akin to the divine fire?  She of all women would never deny him the eternal right to utterance.

Neither could she well find fault with the manner of it.  He went through the sonnets again, trying to read them with her woman’s eyes.  There was nothing, nothing, not an image, not a word that could offend.  Here was no “flaming orgy of individuality.”  He had chosen purposely the consecrated form that pledged him to perfection, bound him to a magnificent restraint.

There still remained the scruple as to the propriety of choosing this precise moment for his gift.  It was over-ridden by the invincible desire to give, the torturing curiosity to know how she would take it.

One more last scruple, easily disposed of.  In all this there was no disloyalty to the woman he was going to make his wife.  For the Sonnets belonged to the past in which she had no part, and to the future which concerned her even less.

The next day, then, at about five o’clock, the time at which Lucia had told him she would be free, he came to her, bringing his gift with him.

Lucia’s face gladdened when she saw the manuscript in his hand; for though they had discussed very freely what he had done once, he had been rather sadly silent, she thought, as to what he was doing now.  He had seemed to her anxious to avoid any question on the subject.  She had wondered whether his genius had been much affected by his other work; and had been half afraid to ask lest she should learn that it was dead, destroyed by journalism.  She had heard so much of the perils of that career, that she had begun to regret her part in helping him to it.  So that her glance as it lighted on the gift was, he thought, propitious.