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 his madness. You’re well—I know it. Oh, Rupert, you aren’t going to die, and we love each other! Oh, God is very good!”

He drew a long breath.

“Are you sure? It’s like coming back from chloroform; and yet it hurts, and yet—but I wrote the book! Oh, Sybil, I shall never write another great book!”

“Ah yes, you will—you shall,” she said, looking at him with wet eyes.

“I have you,” he said. “Oh, thank God, I have you! but I shall never write another great book.”

And he never has.

But he is very happy. And Sybil cannot see that his later works are not in the same field with the first. She thinks the critics fools. And he loves her the more for her folly.