He walked all the way back with me, and I was frightened to see how tired he looked.  I took him to Mrs. Long for the refreshment she loved to give, and begged for the pony for him to ride home on, and a boy to fetch it back.

It was wonderful how much more blue there was in the sea the next day, how the evergreens glistened, and how beautiful and picturesque the old house grew; and when I went out in the morning sunshine, for once, inclined to admit some beauty in the staggering black-legged and visaged lambs, and meditating a walk to the village, I saw Dermot coming across the yard, so wearily and breathlessly, that I could only say, “How could you?”

He looked up piteously.  “You don’t forbid me?” he said.

I almost cried as I told him it was only his fatigue that I objected to; and indeed he was glad enough to take Dora’s now vacated place on the great sofa, while we talked of Viola.  Writing to her had been, of course, impossible for him, and he had only had two short notes from her, so meaningless that I thought she wrote them fearing to disturb him while he was ill; but he muttered an ominous line from Locksley Hall, vituperated Piggy, and confessed that his ground for doing so was that his mother reported Viola as pleased with foreign life, and happy with her cousins.  I said it was his mother’s way, and he replied, “Exactly so; and a girl may be worried into anything.”  A slight dispute on that score cheered him a little, for he showed himself greatly depressed.  He was going—­as soon as he had gathered a little strength—­back to the duties he had promised to fulfil on his own property, but he hated the thought, was down-hearted as to the chances of success, and distrustful of himself among discouragements, and the old associations he had made for himself.  “It is a different thing without Alison to look to and keep one up,” he said.

“There are higher motives,” was my stupid speech.

“It is precious hard on a poor fellow to be left alone with his higher motives, as you call them, before he has well begun to act on his lower.”

And then, I don’t know how, he began talking drearily, almost as if I was not there, of his having once begun to fancy he could do something creditable enough to make me some day look on him as I used to do in the good old times.  My heart gave a great bound, and remembering how Harold said I discouraged him, out came, “How do you know that I don’t?”

How he sprang up!  And—­no, I can’t tell what we said, only we found it was no new beginning, only taking up an old, old precious thread—­ something brought it all out.  He had talked it all over with Harold when he came back from Florence, and had taken home a little hope which he said had helped him through the solitary hours of his recovery.  So it was Harold who, after all, gave us to one another.