e.

Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin
Pierce that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing
something great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the
greatest things a human being can do--of winning a soul that is in
despair back to hope, of winning a heart that is sceptical of love back
to belief in love. It was a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing
it in a strange way. He cast himself down in his degradation at the feet
of this woman whom he was resolved to help, and he said, "Help me!" He
came to this woman who was on the brink of self-destruction and he said,
"Teach me to live!"

It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right--perhaps it
was the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as
nothing. His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day,
were everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only
woman who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift
him up out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she
could not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation.
Lord Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of
herself in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a
beaten dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed
before Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They
never saw the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them
clung to that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white
angel--one hides somewhere surely in every woman--was released.

There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter.
The lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic,
scenes. Viola's love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning
and he could not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full
starlight to which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the
winter set in, he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite
side of the piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people
of the world, and knew what the world might say, but they were also
human beings in distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a
region in which the meaning of the world's voices was lost, as the cry
of an angry child is lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to
his request, and they lived thus, innoce