She listened in a happy bewilderment. It
struck her newly--astonishingly. Her love for him had always included a
tenderly maternal, pitying element. She had felt herself the maturer
character. Sympathy for his task, flattered pleasure in her Egeria role,
deepening into something warmer and intenser with every letter from him
and every meeting, even when she disputed with and condemned him; love in
spite of herself; love with which conscience, taste, aspiration, all
quarrelled; but love nevertheless, the love which good women feel for the
man that is both weaker and stronger than themselves--it was so she might
have read her own past, if the high passion of this ultimate moment had
not blurred it.
But "Life at her grindstone" had been busy with Faversham, and in the
sifted and sharpened soul laid bare to her, the woman recognized her
mate indeed. Face to face with cruelty and falsehood, in others, and with
the potentialities of them in his own nature; dazzled by money and power;
and at last, delivered from the tyranny of the as though by some fierce
gaol-delivering angel, Faversham had found himself; and such a self as
could never have been reasonably prophesied for the discontented idler
who in the May meadows had first set eyes on Lydia Penfold.
He sketched for her his dream of what might be done with the treasures of
the Tower.
Through all his ugly wrestle with Melrose, with its disappointments and
humiliations, his excavator's joy in the rescue and the setting in order
of Melrose's amazing possessions had steadily grown of late, the only
pleasure of his day had come from handling, cleaning and cataloguing the
lovely forgotten things of which the house was full.
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