Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/104

92 that should move mountains, a love that should shine like gold in the furnace of adversity, a constancy that death itself should be powerless to shake. And he sighed. No later love had come to draw with soft lips the poison from this old wound. She had married Benoliel, the West Indian Jew. It is a far cry from Jamaica to London, but some whispers had reached her jilted lover. The kindest of them said that Benoliel neglected his wife, the harshest, that he beat her.

He looked at the photograph. It was two years since he had seen the living woman. Yet still, when he shut his eyes, he could see the delicate tints, the coral, and rose, and pearl, and gold that went to the making up of her. He could always see these. And now he should see the reality. Would the two years have dulled that bright hair, withered at all that flower-face? For he never doubted that he must go to her.

He was a lawyer; perhaps she wanted that sort of help from him, wanted to know how to rid herself of the bitter bad bargain that she had made in marrying the Jew. Whatever he could do he would, of course, but—