cholas Jelnik! I love you too much for that, Sophy. I love you not
only for yourself, but for my own best self, too, my dearest."

For a moment he stood there, regarding me fixedly. It was a long
look, of suffering, of love, of pride, of unyielding resolve. Then
he lifted my hand to his lips, bowed, and left me.

I sat staring over the garden. I wondered if, somewhere on the other
side of things, Great-Aunt Sophronisba wasn't snickering.

CHAPTER XX

HARBOR

"My faith, but I'm glad you're entirely well again, Sophy!" wrote
The Author, in his small, fine, hypercritical script. "You make the
world a pleasanter place by being alive in it. People like you
should inculcate in themselves the fixed and unalterable habit of
being alive. They should firmly refuse to be anything else. I call
this to your attention, in the hope that you will see your bounden
duty and do it.

"When I thought you were going to quit, I ran away. That was a
calamity I could not stand by and witness, without disaster.
However, Jelnik stayed!

"Your nurse (I do not like Miss Ransome, though I respect, admire,
and fear her. Her emotions are carbolized, her heart is sterilized,
her personality has the mathematical perfection of something turned
out by a super-machine: like, say, the last word in machine-guns.
None of the divine imperfection of your hand-wrought, artist-stuff
there! I forgive her for existing, because she is intelligent and
useful, two things that, without lying like a Christian and a
gentleman, one may not say of many women, and seldom of one woman at
the same time), your nurse gave me a highly interesting, impersonal,
scientific account of what happened after my flight. Her testimony
was all the more valuable in that she was, as she said, only
'psychologically interested.' She reminded me that Empedocles is
said to have recalled a young woman from death by the same means,
i.e., the insistent repetition of her name; which proved to Miss
Ransome that the poor old ancients had 'anticipated, though of
course unscientifically, some of the principles of modern
psychology.' _Eheu!_

"It proved something else to me, Sophy--that I had too willingly
underestimated Mr. Nicholas Jelnik. There is very much more to that
young man than I like to admit.

"He would have made such a perfect villain: I could have made a work
of art of him, as a villain! And now I can't, because he isn't. This
chagrins me. It upsets my notions of the fi