He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head and taking another package of the letters from their place.  Her letters!  He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance, his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last two years of her life.  What an innocent life it was that was spread before him; and how young,—­oh, how young!  And it was a happy life.  He was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to come so readily to her lips.  He could detect, too, how the note of gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger existence of Vaucluse.  At last he could be comforted that, however it had ended, it was he who had made it hers.

He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the grate.  That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials which she herself had left.  What he had believed to be loss, bitter, unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become wealth.

His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane.  He scanned the present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good they were.  What it was given him to do for his students, at least what he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear, dear child.

And Gertrude?  Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler proportions.  The worthier aspects of his home life, the finer traits of his wife’s character, stood before him as proofs of what might yet be.  His memory had kept no record of the fact that when in the first year of his youthful sorrow, sick for comfort and believing her all tenderness, he had married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals and purposes.  His judgment held only this, that she had never understood him.  For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself.  Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and sympathy.  Was not a perfect married love worth the minor sacrifices as well as the supreme surrender from which he believed that neither of them would have shrunk?