They kissed once more, love and youth welling up in them, and drowning out of sight, for the moment at least, the shapes and images of pain.  Then recovering his composure, hand fast in hand, Faversham began to talk more calmly, drawing out for her as best he could, so that it need not be done again—­and up to the very evening of the murder—­the history of the nine months which had, so to speak, thrown his whole being into the melting-pot, and through the fusing and bruising of an extraordinary experience, had remade a man.  She listened in a happy bewilderment.  It struck her newly—­astonishingly.  Her love for him had always included a tenderly maternal, pitying element.  She had felt herself the maturer character.  Sympathy for his task, flattered pleasure in her Egeria role, deepening into something warmer and intenser with every letter from him and every meeting, even when she disputed with and condemned him; love in spite of herself; love with which conscience, taste, aspiration, all quarrelled; but love nevertheless, the love which good women feel for the man that is both weaker and stronger than themselves—­it was so she might have read her own past, if the high passion of this ultimate moment had not blurred it.

But “Life at her grindstone” had been busy with Faversham, and in the sifted and sharpened soul laid bare to her, the woman recognized her mate indeed.  Face to face with cruelty and falsehood, in others, and with the potentialities of them in his own nature; dazzled by money and power; and at last, delivered from the tyranny of the as though by some fierce gaol-delivering angel, Faversham had found himself; and such a self as could never have been reasonably prophesied for the discontented idler who in the May meadows had first set eyes on Lydia Penfold.

He sketched for her his dream of what might be done with the treasures of the Tower.

Through all his ugly wrestle with Melrose, with its disappointments and humiliations, his excavator’s joy in the rescue and the setting in order of Melrose’s amazing possessions had steadily grown of late, the only pleasure of his day had come from handling, cleaning and cataloguing the lovely forgotten things of which the house was full.  These surfaces of ivory and silver, of stucco or marble, of wood or canvas, pottery or porcelain, on which the human mind, in love with some fraction of the beauty interwoven with the world, had stamped an impress of itself, sometimes exquisite, sometimes whimsical, sometimes riotous—­above all, living, life reaching to life, through the centuries:  these, from a refuge or an amusement, had become an abiding delight, something, moreover, that seemed to point to a definite lifework—­paid honourably by cash as well as pleasure.

What would she think, he asked her, of a great Museum for the north—­a centre for students—­none of your brick and iron monstrosities, rising amid slums, but a beautiful house showing its beautiful possessions to all who came; and set amid the streams and hills?  And in one wing of it, perhaps, curator’s rooms—­where Lydia, the dear lover of nature and art, might reign and work—­fitly housed?...