When it had all supremely cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well before him as the proper direction of his young friend's leisure, the cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was constituted.

It wasn't only moreover that the word, with a click, so fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfection, fitted the word.

He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his remedy.

Oh, if Charlotte didn't accept him, of course the remedy would fail; but, as everything had fallen together, it was at least there to be tried.

And success would be great--that was his last throb--if the measure of relief effected for Maggie should at all prove to have been given by his own actual sense of felicity.