The door closed behind the eminent man, and Tyson went out immediately afterwards.

He came home late that night, and she did not see him till the afternoon of the following day, when he turned into the dining-room on his way out of the house.  He was nervously polite, and apologized for having an appointment.  She noticed that he looked tired and ill; but there was another look in his face that robbed it of the pathos of illness, and she saw that too.

“Nevill,” said she, “I wish you’d go away for a bit.”

“Where do you want me to go to?”

“Oh, anywhere.”  She considered a moment.  “You’ll be ill if you stop here.  You ought to go ever so far away.  A sea-voyage would be the very thing.”

“It wouldn’t do me much good to go sea-voyaging by myself.”

For a second her face brightened.  “No—­but—­I shall be quite strong in another fortnight—­and then—­I could go out to you wherever you were, and we could come back together, couldn’t we?”

There was no answer.

“You might go—­to please me.”

He laughed shortly.  “I might go to please myself.  But what’s the good of talking about it when you know I can’t.”

“Well, if you’d rather wait, there’s the Riviera”—­he colored violently—­“would that do for you?”

“Yes; I think it would ‘do’ for me—­just about.”

“Well—­anywhere then.  If I’m well enough to go to the Riviera, I’m—­”

“You’re not well enough to go to the Riviera.”

“What makes you think that?” she asked gravely.

He looked away and muttered something about “Thompson,” and “the journey.”  Again that look of agonized comprehension!

She said nothing.  She knew that he had lied.  Ah, to what pitiful shifts she had driven him!

He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window with clenched hands and closed eyelids.  She had no sensations to speak of; but thought came to her—­confused, overwhelming thought—­an agony of ideas.  She loved him.  Ah, the shame of it!  And that hidden hope of hers became a terror.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s soul was struggling with its immortality.  The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world.  Down there, in their dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the shadow of the great flats.

What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson?  She had entered the New Life, as you enter heaven, alone.

CHAPTER XVIII

A MIRACLE