tremulous lip, the drawn white brow. For a moment
he drank in the pity, the emotion, of those eyes. Then a movement of
such self-scorn as even he had never felt swept through him. He gently
moved away; her hand dropped.

'Miss Leyburn,' he said, gazing at her, his olive face singularly pale,
'don't waste your pity on me, for Heaven's sake. Some madness made me
behave as I did just now. Years ago the same sort of idiocy betrayed me
to your brother; never before or since. I ask your pardon, humbly,' and
his tone seemed to scorch her, 'that this second fit of ranting should
have seized me in your presence.'

But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone too far. He
stopped and looked at her--piteously, the features quivering. It was as
though the man's whole nature had for the moment broken up, become
disorganised. She could not bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to
have been laid bare to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he
caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary
scene--to both a kind of lifetime.

Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort.

'That was _adorable_ of you,' he said with a long breath. 'But I stole
it--I despise myself. Why should you pity me? What is there to pity me
for? My troubles, such as I have, are my own making--every one.'

And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The tears of
excitement were in her eyes.

'Won't you let me be your friend?' she said, trembling, with a kind of
reproach. 'I thought--the other night--we were to be friends. Won't you
tell me----'

'More of yourself?' her eyes said, but her voice failed her. And as for
him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circumstance, of
individual character, seemed to drop from her. He forgot the difference
of years; he saw her no longer as she was--a girl hardly out of the
schoolroom, vain, ambitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude
romantic sense he was wantonly playing; she was to him pure beauty, pure
woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold critical instinct which had
been for years draining his life of all its natural energies was
powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never been sweet
before.

So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, of his
cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of happiness and
success at college, of his first attempts to make himself a power among
younger men, of the gradual d