by living.

With her genius for frustrating and tormenting, she kept the poor
man on tenter-hooks with perpetual relapses and recoveries. She
jerked him on the chain. He was always a prisoner on the verge of
his release. She was at death's door in March. In April she was to
be seen, convalescent, in a bath-chair, being wheeled slowly up and
down the Spaniard's Road. And Wilkinson walked by the chair, his
shoulders bent, his eyes fixed on the ground, his face set in an
expression of illimitable patience.

In the summer she gave it up and died; and in the following spring
Wilkinson resumed his converse with Mrs. Norman. All things
considered, he had left a decent interval.

By autumn Mrs. Norman's friends were all on tiptoe and craning their
necks with expectation. It was assumed among them that Wilkinson
would propose to her the following summer, when the first year of
his widowhood should be ended. When summer came there was nothing
between them that anybody could see. But it by no means followed
that there was nothing to be seen. Mrs. Norman seemed perfectly sure
of him. In her intense sympathy for Wilkinson she knew how to
account for all his hesitations and delays. She could not look for
any passionate, decisive step from the broken creature he had
become; she was prepared to accept him as he was, with all his
humiliating fears and waverings. The tragic things his wife had done
to him could not be undone in a day.

Another year divided Wilkinson from his tragedy, and still he stood
trembling weakly on the verge. Mrs. Norman began to grow thin. She
lost her bright air of defiance, and showed herself vulnerable by
the hand of time. And nothing, positively nothing, stood between
them, except Wilkinson's morbid diffidence. So absurdly manifest was
their case that somebody (the Troubadour man, in fact) interposed
discreetly. In the most delicate manner possible, he gave Wilkinson
to understand that he would not necessarily make himself obnoxious
to Mrs. Norman were he to approach her with--well, with a view to
securing their joint happiness--happiness which they had both earned
by their admirable behavior.

That was all that was needed: a tactful friend of both parties to
put it to Wilkinson simply and in the right way. Wilkinson rose from
his abasement. There was a light in his eye that rejoiced the
tactful friend; his face had a look of sudden, virile determination.

"I will go to her," he said, "now."

It was