“Yes, I have forgiven you,” she said softly. “I could not until, months after my husband’s death, a letter came to me from him, which had been lost long in reaching me. It was so noble, so great, so reconciling, that it sufficed for all—even that,” she added, with unsparing truthfulness. Then, even more gently:—
“It is altogether from him that I am here to-day. I could never have seen you again if it had not been for that letter.”
“Then I owe to him the greatest mercy of my life,” said John Gregory, solemnly, “and it is fitting that I should. He was a gentler man than I, a better man. I did not rightly appreciate him when he was among us.”
“He had no noisy virtues,” Anna said. “I think none of us perceived fully what he was until he was gone.”
Then with great delicacy she told Gregory all that the letter had brought of reconcilement, and especially the word to him. He heard it in brooding silence, and his face grew very calm.
“I wanted you to know,” Gregory began after a long pause, “that my feeling toward you has not been evil or base or wholly selfish. From the time I first saw that picture,” and he pointed to that above the fireplace, “you became to me a kind of religion. You stood to me for the absolute purity of my ideal, untainted by self and sin and even sorrow. That picture gave you to me as a virgin soul in the first dawning of a great and noble expectation. It was a picture which a Galahad might have worshipped. But alas! I was no Galahad.
“I was bringing the picture back to this country, and it happened, although you never knew it, that I crossed on the same ship with you.”
“How could it have been,” cried Anna, “that I never saw you?”
“I was with my East London people in the other part of the ship. But I used often to see you with your husband and with the many friends who always made a circle about you, and I fancied I saw a change in your look,—a change which betokened a gradual dimming of your higher vision, a fading of your ideal. I thought the people about you were changing you to their own likeness in some degree, and the thought haunted and disturbed me more than I had a right to let it.
“I came to Fulham with the picture, which I had promised to return to Everett. When I reached his house late in the evening, his mother received me and told me that he and ‘all the world’ were at a great reception at your house. She further told me that your husband’s mother had confided in her her hopes and her confidence that a new era of social leadership was now before you, and added that you were indeed already quite ‘the fashion’ in Fulham’s aristocratic circle.