so much better than Brady or Perry
Bridewell, he should have been overtaken by a retribution which they had
so easily escaped. An unreasonable anger against Laura pervaded his
thoughts, but this very anger lent fervour to the admiration he now felt
for her. He knew she loved him and if--as in the case of no other woman
he had ever known--her love could be dominated and subdued by her
recognition of what was due her honour, his feeling rather than his
thought, assured him that he would be reduced to a moral submission
approaching the abject. Though he hoped passionately that she would
yield, he realised in his heart that he would adore her if she remained
implacable. Love is not always pleased with reverence, but reverence, he
saw dimly through some pathetic instinct for virtue, is the strongest
possible hold that love can claim. He, himself, would always live in the
external world of the senses, yet deep within him, half smothered by the
clouds of his egoism, there was still a blind recognition of that other
world beyond sense which he had shut out. To this other world, for the
time at least, Laura, with all the enchantment of the distance, appeared
to belong.

The morning, with its unusual burden of introspection, was, perhaps, the
most miserable he had ever spent, and after he had lunched at his
club--when to his surprise he found that his appetite was entirely
undisturbed by his mental processes--he returned to his rooms before
starting dejectedly for a long run in his automobile. But a letter from
Laura was the first object he noticed upon his desk, and his afternoon
plans were swept from his mind with the beginning of her heart-broken
entreaty for reconciliation. While he read it there was recognition in
his thoughts for no feeling except his rapture in her recovery, and he
took up his pen with a hand which trembled in the shock of his reaction
from despair to happiness. Then, while he still hesitated, in a mixture
of self-reproach and tenderness, there was a knock at his door, it
opened and shut quickly, with an abruptness which even in inanimate
things speak of excitement, and Laura, herself, breathing rapidly and
very pale, came hurriedly across the room.

"I could not stay away--you did not answer my note--it would have killed
me," she began brokenly; and as he stretched out his arms she threw
herself into them with a burst of tears.

"Oh, you angel!" he exclaimed, in a tenderness which was almost an
ecstasy