only too thankful that Michael took everything so quietly. But after a
few days he became uneasy at his brother's inertness of mind and body. A
great doctor, however, explained Michael's state very much as the
Italian doctor had done. He was in an exhausted condition. What was
essential to him was rest. He must not be made to see anyone or do
anything he did not like.

"Your brother will regain his health entirely," the great man had said,
"if he is left in peace, and nothing happens to overexcite him. He is
worn to a shadow by that accursed prison. Many men in his condition
can't rest. Then they die. He can. He has the temperament that
acquiesces. He will cure himself if he is left alone. Let him lie in
the sun, and give nature a chance."

In spite of his anxiety Wentworth saw that Michael's bodily strength was
slowly returning. Every afternoon he left him half asleep in the sun,
and rode over to see Fay. Since she had accepted him it had become a
necessity to him to see her every day.

Wentworth had long been bent to the dust under the pain of Michael's
imprisonment. Fay had been bent with anguish to the dust by the weight
of her own silence which had kept him there.

And now in the twinkling of an eye they both stood erect, freed. Life
was transfigured for both at the same instant.

This marvellous moment found them both just when they were deciding
mildly to love each other. It took them and flung them together in a
common overwhelming joy. It almost seemed as if the shock might make a
man of Wentworth.

Did he half know (he was certainly always tacitly guarding himself
against the assumption of such an idea in the minds of others) that he
had so far been left out, not only from the whirl of life--he had
deliberately withdrawn from that--but from the weft of life itself. The
great loom had not swept him in. It had not appeared to need him. Some
of us seem to hang on the fringe of life, of thought, of love, of
everything. We are not for good or ill interwoven into the stuff, part
of the pattern.

Wentworth felt young for the first time in his life, happy for the first
time in his life, really energetic for the first time. A certain languid
fatigue which had been with him from boyhood, which had always lain
mournfully on its back waving its legs in the air like a reversed
Battle, had now been jolted right side upper-most, and was using those
legs, not as proofs of the emptiness of the world, but as a means of