came to him, if he could but
once realise how much there was of what he had missed! If he did not
save himself--and her--what would be the end? She felt the cords drawing
her elsewhere; the lure of a voice she had heard in an Egyptian garden
was in her ears. One night at Hamley, in an abandonment of grief-life
hurt her so--she had remembered the prophecy she had once made that she
would speak to David, and that he would hear; and she had risen from her
seat, impelled by a strange new feeling, and had cried: "Speak! speak
to me!" As plainly as she had ever heard anything in her life, she had
heard his voice speak to her a message that sank into the innermost
recesses of her being, and she had been more patient afterwards. She had
no doubt whatever; she had spoken to him, and he had answered; but the
answer was one which all the world might have heard.

Down deep in her nature was an inalienable loyalty, was a simple,
old-fashioned feeling that "they two," she and Eglington, should cleave
unto each other till death should part. He had done much to shatter
that feeling; but now, as she listened to Mario's voice, centuries of
predisposition worked in her, and a great pity awoke in her heart. Could
she not save him, win him, wake him, cure him of the disease of Self?

The thought brought a light to her eyes which had not been there
for many a day. Out of the deeps of her soul this mist of a pure
selflessness rose, the spirit of that idealism which was the real chord
of sympathy between her and Egypt.

Yes, she would, this once again, try to win the heart of this man; and
so reach what was deeper than heart, and so also give him that without
which his life must be a failure in the end, as Sybil Eglington had
said. How often had those bitter anguished words of his mother rung in
her ears--"So brilliant and unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh,
so sure of winning a great place in the world... so calculating and
determined and ambitious!" They came to her now, flashed between
the eager solicitous eyes of her mind and the scene of a perfect and
everlasting reconciliation which it conjured up--flashed and were gone;
for her will rose up and blurred them into mist; and other words of
that true palimpsest of Sybil Eglington's broken life came instead: "And
though he loves me little, as he loves you little too, yet he is my son,
and for what he is we are both responsible one way or another." As the
mother, so the wife. She said to