"You may feel it, but it is not the case."
And later in the day, Alan was obliged to confess that he had boasted too soon, for there was a slight return of fever, and the doctor whom Lettice had called in was more emphatic than she had been as to the necessity for complete rest of mind and body.
So for the next week he was treated quite as an invalid, to his great disgust. Then he fairly turned the corner, and things began to change for the better again. Lettice read to him, talked, played chess, found out his tastes in music and in art (tastes in some respects a little primitive, but singularly fine and true, in spite of their want of training), and played his favorite airs for him on the piano—some of Mendelssohn's plaintive Lieder, the quainter and statelier measures of Corelli and Scarlatti, snatches of Schumann and Grieg, and several older and simpler melodies, for most of which he had to ask by humming a few bars which had impressed themselves on his memory.
As the month wore itself out, the success of Lettice's experiment was in a fair way of being justified. She had charmed the evil spirit of despair from Alan's breast, and had won him back to manly resistance and courageous effort. With returning bodily strength came a greater robustness of mind, and a resolution—borrowed, perhaps, in the first instance, from his companion—to be stronger than his persecutors, and rise superior to his troubles.
In the conversations which grew out of their daily readings, Lettice was careful to draw him as much as possible into literary discussions and criticisms, and Alan found himself dwelling to an appreciative listener on certain of his own ideas on poetic and dramatic methods. There is but a step from methods to instances; and when Lettice came into his room one morning—she never showed herself before mid-day—she saw with delight on the paper before him an unmistakable stream of verses meandering down the middle of the sheet.
He had set to work! Then he was saved—saved from himself, and from the ghouls that harbor in a desolate and outraged mind.
If, beyond this, you ask me how she had gained her end, and done the good thing on which she had set her heart, I cannot tell you, any more than I could make plain the ways in which nature works to bring all her great and marvelous mysteries to pass. Lettice's achievement, like her resolution, argued both heart and intellect. Alan would not have yielded to anyone else, and he yielded to her because he loved her with the feelings and the understanding together. She had mastered his affections and his intelligence at the same time: she left him to hunger and thirst up to the moment of his abject abasement, and then she came unasked, unhoped, from her towering height to his lowest deep, and gave him—herself!
"Do you remember," he said to her once, when he had got her to talk of her successful story, "that bit of Browning which you quote near the end? Did you ever think that I could be infatuated enough to apply the words to myself, and take comfort from them in my trouble?"
She blushed and trembled as he looked at her for an answer.
"I meant you to do it!".