often with deep compassion.  Much of sympathy, moreover, there was between these two.  Maud’s artistic temperament was inherited from her mother, but she possessed it in a stronger degree, of purer quality, and under greater restraint.  This restraint, however, did not long continue to be exercised as hitherto.  Life for the first time was open before her, and the music which began to fill her ears, the splendour which shone into her eyes, gradually availed to still that inner voice which had so long spoken to her in dark admonishings.  She could not resign herself absolutely to the new delight; it was still a conflict; but from the conflict itself she derived a kind of joy, born of the strength of her imagination.

Yes, there was one portion of the past which dwelt with her, and by degrees busied her thoughts more and more.  The correspondence with Waymark had ceased, and by her own negligence.  In those days of mental disturbance which preceded her return to London, his last letter had reached her, and this she had not replied to.  It had been her turn to write, but she had not felt able to do so; it had seemed to her, indeed, that, with her return home, the correspondence would naturally come to an end; with a strange ignorance of herself, such as now and then darkens us, she had suddenly come to attach little value to the connection.  Not improbably, Waymark’s last two letters had been forced and lacking in interest.  He had never said anything which could be construed into more than an expression of friendly interest, or intellectual sympathy.  It may be that Maud’s condition, dimly prophetic of the coming change, required more than this, and she conceived a certain dissatisfaction.  Then came the great event, and for some weeks she scarcely thought of her correspondent.  One day, however, she chanced upon the little packet of his letters, and read them through again.  It was with new eyes.  Thoughts spoke to her which had not been there on the first reading.  Waymark had touched at times on art and kindred subjects, and only now could she understand his meaning.  She felt that, in breaking off her connection with him, she had lost the one person who could give her entire sympathy; to whom she might have spoken with certainty of being understood, of all the novel ideas which possessed her; who, indeed, would have been invaluable as a guide in the unknown land she was treading.  It was now almost the end of the year; more than three months had gone by since she received that last letter from him.  Could she write now, and let him know that she was in London?  She could not but give expression to her altered self; and would he be able to understand her?  Yet,—­she needed him; and there was something of her mother in the fretting to which she was now and then driven by the balked desire.  At length she was on the point of writing a letter, with whatever result, when chance spared her the trouble.