I think now that he understood me then and before far
better than I dreamed. He only put his hand on mine with an unutterable
tenderness. I could read nothing on his face but a grave common-sense.
Presently he unbuttoned my sleeves and the close collar about my throat
to let the cool damp blow on me.

"Yes," I said, "it's a fever, Daniel. In the blood. That is all,--with
me. I decided that long ago. It will not last long." And I laughed.

"Come," he said, quietly. "I am going to write to Rob now, about our
plans. You can help me."

I followed him, and sat down by the table. "There is something in the
man stronger than the woman," I thought, doggedly, "inside of blood and
muscle." Yet the very galling of that consciousness set me more firmly
in the mind to be again free.

A month after that we came to Newport. It was not an idle month. Jacky
had proposed a review of my husband's and his sons' clothes, and day
after day I had sat by the window looking out on the sluggish Hudson, a
hank of patent thread about my neck, stitching patches on the stiff,
half-worn trousers. "It becomes us to take care of the pence now," she
would say, and go on with her everlasting whistling, La-la. It rasped on
my brain like the chirp of the partridge outside in the cedar-hedge.
When she would go out of the room sometimes, I would hold my hand to my
head, and wonder if it was for this in reality God had made me.

Yet I had my own secret. The work of my life, before I was married, had
been the score of an opera. I got it out now by stealth, at night,
putting my pen to it here and there, with the controlled fever with
which a man might lay his hand on a dear dead face, if he knew the touch
would bring it back to life. Was there any waking that dead life of
mine? At that time, in New York, M. Vaux was trying the experiment of an
English opera in one of the minor theatres. I sent the score to him. It
did not trouble me, that, if produced, its first effect would be tried
on an uncultured caste of hearers: if the leaven was pure, what matter
where it began to work? and no poet or artist was ever more sincere in
the belief that the divine power spoke through Him than I. I thought,
that, if I remained with Doctor Manning as his wife, this venture
mattered little: if I shook myself free, and, taking up my mission, came
before the public as a singer, it would open the way for me. For my plan
had grown defined and practical to me now.

M. Vaux had