But in the meantime the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but unsuppressed.

Once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined.

This man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent.

But when he disclosed--to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him--that he had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return, that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable, and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her resistance gave way,--and little by little, in her own beautiful words, she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she could still do something for the happiness of another.

In another sense than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the Portuguese," Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death, and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing, almost extinguished, desire to live.