While he was still hiding his face before the very picture which he and
his wife had once innocently and secretly glorified together, in those
happy days of its beginning that were never to come again, the sudden
thought of consolation shone out on his heart, and showed him how he
might adorn all his afterlife with the deathless beauty of a pure and
noble purpose. Thenceforth, his vague dreams of fame, and of rich men
wrangling with each other for the possession of his pictures, took the
second place in his mind; and, in their stead, sprang up the new
resolution that he would win independently, with his own brush, no
matter at what sacrifice of pride and ambition, the means of
surrounding his sick wife with all those luxuries and refinements which
his own little income did not enable him to obtain, and which he shrank
with instinctive delicacy from accepting as presents bestowed by his
father's generosity. Here was the consoling purpose which robbed
affliction of half its bitterness already, and bound him and his art
together by a bond more sacred than any that had united them before. In
the very hour when this thought came to him, he rose without a pang to
turn the great historical composition, from which he had once hoped so
much, with its face to the wall, and set himself to finish an
unpretending little "Study" of a cottage courtyard, which he was
certain of selling to a picture-dealing friend. The first approach to
happiness which he had known for a long, long time past, was on the
evening of that day, when he went upstairs to sit with Lavinia; and,
keeping secret his purpose of the morning, made the sick woman smile in
spite of her sufferings, by asking her how she should like to have her
room furnished, if she were the lady of a great lord, instead of being
only the wife of Valentine Blyth.

Then came the happy day when the secret was revealed, and afterwards
the pleasant years when poor Mrs. Blyth's most splendid visions of