t, as well as for your care and tenderness. We shall see him
married and domesticated before a year has passed! I am impatient for
you both to come. Do not let anything prevent you."

It was quite true that Lettice had set to work again, and that she
appeared to have overcome the home-sickness which at one time made her
long to get back to London. Restored health made her feel more satisfied
with her surroundings, and a commission for a new story had found her
just in the humor to sit down and begin. She was penetrated by the
beauty of the Tuscan city which had been her kindly nurse, which was now
her fount of inspiration and inexhaustible source of new ideas. A plot,
characters, scenery, stage, impressed themselves on her imagination as
she wandered amongst the stones and canvasses of Florence; and they grew
upon her more and more distinctly every day, as she steeped herself in
the spirit of the place and time. She would not go back to the
picturesque records of other centuries but took her portraits from men
and women of the time, and tried to recognize in them the descendants of
the artists, scholars, philosophers, and patriots, who have shed undying
fame on the queen-city of northern Italy.

Entirely buried in her work, and putting away from her all that might
interfere with its performance, she forgot for a time both herself and
others. If she was selfish in her isolation it was with the selfishness
of one who for art's sake is prepared to abandon her ease and pleasure
in the laborious pursuit of an ideal. Mrs. Hartley was content to leave
her for a quarter of the day in the solitude of her own room on
condition of sharing her idleness or recreation during the rest of their
waking hours.

Had Lettice forgotten Alan Walcott at this crisis in the lives of both?
When Mrs. Hartley was assuring her cousin that all the ties which had
bound the girl to London were severed, Alan was expiating in prison the
crime of which he had been convicted, which, in his morbid abasement and
despair he was almost ready to confess that he had committed. Was he,
indeed, as he had not very sincerely prayed to be, forgotten by the
woman he loved?

It is no simple question for her biographer to answer off-hand. Lettice,
as we know, had admitted into her heart a feeling of sympathetic
tenderness for Alan, which, under other circumstances, she would have
accepted as worthy to dominate her life and dictate its moods and
duties. But the man