’At least you will accept a division of the property, Harry.  It should be yours.  It is an excess, and I feel it a snare to me.  I was a selfish child:  I may not become an estimable woman.  You have not pardoned my behaviour at the island last year, and I cannot think I was wrong:  perhaps I might learn:  I want your friendship and counsel.  Aunty will live with me:  she says that you would complete us.  At any rate I transfer Riversley to you.  Send me your consent.  Papa will have it before the transfer is signed.’

The letter ended with an adieu, a petition for an answer, and ’yours affectionately.’

On the day of its date, a Viennese newspaper lying on the Salzburg Hotel table chronicled Ottilia’s marriage with Prince Hermann.

I turned on Temple to walk him off his legs if I could.

Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest:  learn to discover ungrudgingly that haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward.  Would you know what it is to hope again, and have all your hopes at hand?—­hang upon the crags at a gradient:  that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you may become.  There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient:  if just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be.  How the old lax life closes in about you there!  You are the man of your faculties, nothing more.  Why should a man pretend to more?  We ask it wonderingly when we are healthy.  Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical herb.  He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to the mountain kine.

CHAPTER LIV

MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in love with the East, until it began to consume me.  History, like the air we breathe, must be in motion to keep us uncorrupt:  otherwise its ancient homes are infectious.  My passion for the sun and his baked people lasted awhile, the drudgery of the habit of voluntary exile some time longer, and then, quite unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so violent that I abandoned a correspondence of several months, lying for me both at Damascus and Cairo, to catch the boat for Europe.  A dream of a rainy morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have been the origin of the wild craving I had for my native