M. le Major was right--"elle avait toutes les intelligences de la tete
et du coeur." And old and young, the best and the worst, seemed to love
and respect her alike--and women as well as men--for her perfect
sincerity, her sweet reasonableness.

And all this time I was plodding at my dull drawing-board in
Pentonville, carrying out another's designs for a stable or a pauper's
cottage, and not even achieving that poor task particularly well!

It would have driven me mad with humiliation and jealousy to see this
past life of hers, but we saw it all hand in hand together--the magical
circuit was established! And I knew, as I saw, how it all affected her,
and marvelled at her simplicity in thinking all this pomp and splendor
of so little consequence.

And I trembled to find that what space in her heart was not filled by
the remembrance of her ever-beloved mother and the image of her father
(one of the noblest and best of men) enshrined the ridiculous figure of
a small boy in a white silk hat and an Eton jacket. And that small
boy was I!

Then came a dreadful twelvemonth that I was fain to leave a blank--the
twelvemonth during which her girlish fancy for her husband lasted--and
then her life was mine again forever!

And _my_ life!

The life of a convict is not, as a rule, a happy one; his bed is not
generally thought a bed of roses.