ser, to wish for a fairy coach than
to cherish longings for a well-appointed brougham and liveried servants.

He turned his back on the green walls and the dark oaks without any
feeling of regret or resentment. After a little while he began to think
of his adventures with pleasure; the ladder by which he had mounted had
disappeared, but he was safe on the height. By the chance fancy of a
beautiful girl he had been redeemed from a world of misery and torture,
the world of external things into which he had come a stranger by which
he had been tormented. He looked back at a kind of vision of himself seen
as he was a year before, a pitiable creature burning and twisting on the
hot coals of the pit, crying lamentably to the laughing bystanders for
but one drop of cold water wherewith to cool his tongue. He confessed to
himself, with some contempt, that he had been a social being, depending
for his happiness on the goodwill of others; he had tried hard to write,
chiefly, it was true, from love of the art, but a little from a social
motive. He had imagined that a written book and the praise of responsible
journals would ensure him the respect of the county people. It was a
quaint idea, and he saw the lamentable fallacies naked; in the first
place, a painstaking artist in words was not respected by the
respectable; secondly, books should not be written with the object of
gaining the goodwill of the landed and commercial interests; thirdly and
chiefly, no man should in any way depend on another.

From this utter darkness, from danger of madness, the ever dear and sweet
Annie had rescued him. Very beautifully and fitly, as Lucian thought, she
had done her work without any desire to benefit him, she had simply
willed to gratify her own passion, and in doing this had handed to him
the priceless secret. And he, on his side, had reversed the process;
merely to make himself a splendid offering for the acceptance of his
sweetheart, he had cast aside the vain world, and had found the truth,
which now remained with him, precious and enduring.

And since the news of the marriage he found that his worship of her had
by no means vanished; rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of a
happy love, untarnished and spotless; it would be like a mirror of gold
without alloy, bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no defect
in the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived an
affection for certain moral or intel