but for the blessing of its many sicknesses!

When Godfrey saw her moving about the house as in former days, but
changed, like one of the ghosts of his saddest dreams, a new love began
to rise out of the buried seed of the old. In vain he reasoned with
himself, in vain ho resisted. The image of Letty, with its trusting
eyes fixed on him so "solemn sad," and its watching looks full of
ministration, haunted him, and was too much for him. She was never the
sort of woman he could have fancied himself falling in love with; he
did in fact say to himself that she was only _almost_ a lady-but at the
word his heart rebuked him for a traitor to love and its holy laws.
Neither in person was she at all his ideal. A woman like Hesper,
uplifted and strong, broad-fronted and fearless, large-limbed, and full
of latent life, was more of the ideal he could have written poetry
about. But we are deeper than we know. Who is capable of knowing his
own ideal? The ideal of a man's self is hid in the bosom of God, and
may lie ages away from his knowledge; and his ideal of woman is the
ideal belonging to this unknown self: the ideal only can bring forth an
ideal. He can not, therefore, know his own ideal of woman; it is,
nevertheless--so I presume--this his own unknown ideal that makes a man
choose against his choice. Gladly would Godfrey now have taken Letty to
his arms. It was no longer anything that from boyhood he had vowed
rather to die unmarried, and let the land go to a stranger, than marry
a widow. He had to recall every restraining fact of his and her
position to prevent him from now precipitating that which he had before
too long delayed. But the gulf of the grave and the jealousy of a
mother were between them; for, if he were again to rouse her
suspicions, she would certainly get rid of Letty, as she had before
intended, so depriving her of a home, and him of opportunity. He kept,
therefore, out of Letty's way as much as he could, went more about the
farm, and took long rides.

Nothing was further from Letty than any merest suspicion of the sort of
regard Godfrey cherished for her. There was in her nothing of the
self-sentimental. Her poet was gone from her, but she did not therefore
take to poetry; nay, what poetry she had learned to like was no longer
anything to her, now her singing bird had flown to the land of song. To
her, Tom was the greatest, the one poet of the age; he had been
hers--was hers still, for did ho not die telli