to be quite curable.

He performed an operation upon the leg, and after a long and careful
course of treatment in town, advised that I should go to Margate for
a long stay, and avail myself of that change of air. I went,
accompanied by my mother and brother, and stayed there several
months. My father used to come to see us once a month or so, stay for
a week, and then go back.

I now wrote another letter to Winifred, and after a long delay, got a
reply, but it consisted mainly of descriptions of the way in which
she paddled in the Welsh brooks and of lessons in the shawl-dance
which she was taking from Shuri Lovell, the mother of her Gypsy
friend. So vividly did she describe these lessons that her pictures
haunted me. I wrote in reply to this a letter burning with my
ever-growing love, but to this I got no reply.

As the surgeon had prophesied, I made such advance that I was after a
while able to walk with tolerable ease without my crutches, by the
aid of a walking-stick; and as time went on, the tonic effect of
Margate air, aiding the remedies prescribed by the surgeon, worked
such a change in me that I was pronounced well, and the doctor said I
might return home. I returned to Raxton a cripple no longer.

I returned cured. I say. But how entangled is this web of our life!
How almost impossible is it that good should come unmixed with evil,
or evil unmixed with good! At Margate, where the bracing air did
more, I doubt not, towards my restoration to health than all the
medicines,--at Margate my brother drank in his death-poison.