She was so tired, so heart sick, so full of longing for the love she had lost.
"Felix," she sobbed, and, blindly groping to reach what she feared was a hallucination, she stumbled down the steps, and was caught up in the arms flung wide to catch her, and which folded about her as if forever. She sighed his name again, upon the passionate young lips which had inherited the great love she had put aside so long before.
As the last words died away, the Critic drew himself up and laughed.
He had told the story very dramatically, reading the letter from the envelope he had called a "property," and he had told it well.
The laugh broke the spell, and the Doctor echoed it heartily.
"All right, old man," said the Critic, "you owed me that laugh. You're welcome."
"I was only thinking," said the Doctor, his face still on a broad grin, "that we have always thought you ought to have been a novelist, and now we know at last just what kind of a novelist you would have been."
"Don't you believe it," said the Critic, "That was only improvisatore—that's no sample."
"Ho, ho! I'll bet you anything that the manuscript is up in your trunk, and that you have been committing it to memory ever since this idea was proposed," said the Doctor, still laughing.