and looks, those melancholy, gracious airs that ravished
him perpetually! And now this new attitude, as of a child leaning,
wistfully looking in your face, asking to be led, to be wrestled and
reasoned with.

The days, as they passed, produced in him a secret and mounting
intoxication. Then, perhaps for a day or two, there would be a reaction,
both foreseeing that a kind of spiritual tyranny might arise from their
relation, and both recoiling from it....

One night she was very restless and silent. There seemed to be no means
of approach to her true mind. Suddenly he took her hand--it was some
days since they had spoken of Warkworth--and almost roughly reminded her
of her promise to tell him all.

She rebelled. But his look and manner held her, and the inner misery
sought an outlet. Submissively she began to speak, in her low, murmuring
voice; she went back over the past--the winter in Bruton Street; the
first news of the Moffatt engagement; her efforts for Warkworth's
promotion; the history of the evening party which had led to her
banishment; the struggle in her own mind and Warkworth's; the sudden mad
schemes of their last interview; the rush of the Paris journey.

The mingled exaltation and anguish, the comparative absence of regret
with which she told the story, produced an astonishing effect on
Delafield. And in both minds, as the story proceeded, there emerged ever
more clearly the consciousness of that imperious act by which he had
saved her.

Suddenly she stopped.

"I know you can find no excuse for it all," she said, in excitement.

"Yes; for all--but for one thing," was his low reply.

She shrank, her eyes on his face.

"That poor child," he said, under his breath.

She looked at him piteously.

"Did you ever realize what you were doing?" he asked her, raising her
hand to his lips.

"No, no! How could I? I thought of some one so different--I had never
seen her--"

She paused, her wide--seeking gaze fixed upon him through tears, as
though she pleaded with him to find explanations--palliatives.

But he gently shook his head.

Suddenly, shaken with weeping, she bowed her face upon the hands that
held her own. It was like one who relinquishes all pleading, all
defence, and throws herself on the mercy of the judge.

He tenderly asked her pardon if he had wounded her. But he shrank from
offering any caress. The outward signs of life's most poignant and most
beautiful moments are generally very