As she thought of all these things in the light of her new experience, her heart was touched again by the old sympathy, and throbbed once more with the music which it had not known since her illness began. It was a harp which had been laid aside and forgotten, till the owner, coming by chance into the disused room, strung it anew, and bade it discourse the symphonies of the olden time.
Not until Lettice had reached this point in her retrospect did she perceive how near she had gone to the dividing line which separates honor from faithlessness and truth from falsehood. She had said, "There is no one to whom my love is pledged." Was that true? Which is stronger or more sacred—the pledge of words or the pledge of feeling? She had tried to drown the feeling, but it would not die. It was there, it had never been absent; and she had profaned it by listening to the temptations of Brooke Dalton, and by telling him that her heart was free.
"It was a lie!"
She sank on the sofa as she made the confession to herself. Alan's letters were in her hand; she clasped them to her breast, and murmured,
"It was a lie—for I love you!"
If the poor wretch in his prison cell, who, worn out at last by daily self-consuming doubts, lay tossing with fever on a restless bed, could have heard her words and seen her action, he might have been called back to life from the borderland of the grave.
CHAPTER XXX.
AWAKENED.
"What is it, darling?" Mrs. Hartley said to her friend when they met the next morning at the late breakfast which, out of deference to foreign customs, they had adopted. She looked observantly at the restless movements of the girl, and the changing color in her cheeks. "You have not eaten anything, and you do nothing but shiver and sigh."